For what it's worth: Argon is a pretty good model, and this is coming from someone who just sticks with Opus 5.5 mostly across the board. For the current introductory price, it provides an exceptional value. Looks like they're trying to release Carbon (which is apparently a significant improvement) at the same price as Argon, which would be a crazy value.

It's worth trying if you have easy access to it (we use Cursor at work, so it was just a matter of picking a different model for me). Don't know if I'd go out of my way to get a Google AI subscription for it, but if Carbon ends up meeting these expectations, then it may be worth doing so.

They’re not the only ones to do it, so I’m guessing their idea is to double-dip attention.

For me it also works the opposite way, when it actually comes out eventually it’ll already be old news.

I agree. Announcing a new model without immediate availability or a definite release date seems confusing than just doing it later. When Carbon is made GA, OpenAI or Anthropic might just release their new model, and we'd be like: Carbon what?

Having said that, I don't see people excited about using Argon so far, so that might be why Google is announcing this to hype Gemini up a bit.

Argon has been publicly available for weeks to Ultra users.

Anthropic has been doing this with Mythos for quite some time...

They finally gave the $20/month pro tier access to argon in antigravity so I tried it a few days ago on one small thing and ...

it actually did really well.

But it still annoys me: I told it to _tell_ me something, and instead it _implemented_ the something. The previous models were way too eager to just jump in and do and this one seems no different. But the optimization it identified was both really solid and just a good engineering choice, and better than what Opus had been suggesting.

It also gave pretty good feedback on a bit of writing.

great writer, starts forgetting instructions around 80k context in my experience

it’s pleasant

I paid for their lowest-cost subscription, thinking that it would give me a small quota of use of their most recent flash models. Instead, they give me an unnecessarily large quota of their old models, which I have precisely zero use for given that open-weight models are better and cost next to nothing.

Consequently, I have zero intention of renewing my Gemini subscription. What a dumb business choice they made.

It's Google. They can't help themselves. This is what they do.