1. "Building on Gemini 4 Argon". 2. Same price. 3. Relatively short time between releases.

Makes me think it's further post-training of the same model.

Their Flash-lite, Flash, Pro naming convention was fine, at least until they stopped updating the Pro model lol. I guess the marketing department wanted a clean reset so that people would forget that gap, so they copied the other companies.

But they still kept the embarrassing 3.1 pro model in the Gemini app to remind people, so I'm not sure what they achieved.

For Gemini that is a foundation model version 3.1 3.5 4 etc. and there is checkpoint on evolution of those specific models. Gemini 4 had Argon - B<> - Carbon and who knows they might have Dysporsium or Europium.

Or you might get Gemini 5 Arizona.

Yes.. very confusing names. Carbon is the next iteration of Argon.

It's just what some PM thinks sounds cool

Carbon is like Opus

Argon is like Sonnet