> Argon will launch at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off input token price.
Trading punches in the benchmarks with Mimo v2.6 and 6.1-Sol (both very cheap!), and decidedly inferior to Opus 5.5. I'm afraid this looks unimpressive. Rather comical that they're delaying its launch "for safety reasons".
What are you talking about? It’s comparable to Opus 5.5 on “high” (54 vs 53; $1.82 vs $1.99), crushes every model except the most modern OAI/Ant ones, has way lower hallucination than every existing model and probably broader support for multimodal like existing Gemini models. This is so ludicrously off base.
From the charts, it's similar in intelligence and cost per task to both Opus 5.5 (high) and 6-Astra (max). It would be better if it were more intelligent and less expensive, but I don't see a reason to expect it to have better performance than models released around the same time.
To play the Devil's advocate, Claude loves chugging tokens, while Gemini appears to be quite a bit more conservative and efficient. I believe AA's price per task breakdown reflects this.
What a snooze fest. Another model that does not meaningfully improve on intelligence or price compared to its peers. Google has basically announced that they've "caught up" with the rest. I think they've been doing great work in the Flash department so seeing this is... underwhelming?
The only models beating it are on "max", while this is "high". There's no guarantee that those effort / reasoning levels compare, but there's almost certainly an "xhigh" or "max" version later which will score higher there.
I found that Google does not benchmaxx as much as the other providers. Of you look at real-case evaluation like lm-arena, even the 3.8 flash is often near the top despite its benchmark index being worse.
I noticed this recently with the user submitted benchmarks on Kaggle. For these obscure tests that the models haven't seen, Gemini 3.8 is often on par or beating other frontier models. Gemini is a bit shite at the game checkers though, for some weird reason it performs poorly on those benchmarks.
Note: Google can sell their tokens at cost if they really want to drive out competition, but long term they are better off by everyone making a healthy margin (and Google does a double-dip by also selling compute, services).
So, like any optimal game theory move, they are better off not starting a price war
Google is losing in the market share - their share is 0. Anthropic revenue was $60B in the last 12 months. Google is not growing the pie, it needs to buy its way to the market share and to a seat in the table.
It's hard to not see this as a gut punch for OpenAI. They're lead was largely captured by scoring on value (by way of reset after reset) and now they're getting eaten up on price and being bestes and equalled on performance. I'll still pay a premium for Opus 5.5 right now because it's nearly unlimited use, but Google is the quiet sleeping king
Everyone is happy to watch everyone else, but I'd wager google burns more tokens through their search product than basically anyone else and now they're just quietly pacing the frontier...
Sol 6.1 scores one point less than Gemini 4 on intelligence AND costs less than half ($0.72 vs $1.99) per task.
Additionally, if you are using OpenAI you have the option to pay a bit more and get Astra which - despite the benchmarks - does outperform Sol on some things.
Also, people are - rightly - very wary of Google's benchmaxxing tendencies. I think lots of people remember Gemini 3.0 (I think?) which benchmarked amazingly, but as soon as you used it would go off-track and needed constant babysitting if you wanted to use it for agentic work.
5 points off Opus 5.5 on AA, not a good release. Falling behind and not able to catchup. Ant probably has opus 6 in the works. Fumbled so hard on this, they should have owned AI.
I'm not sure Google can cut in when Claude and ChatGPT already got. I'm using both, but I'll keep track of whether Google can make it good enough for me to use also this Gemini, or cancel one of the two (Claude and ChaGPT) for it.
I’m guessing this is considered something like a C grade from Google if they are being honest with themselves.
After being nowhere near the frontier for a long time, they are pre announcing a model that ranks 3rd, roughly on par with models today that are cheaper.
Good for them to think about releasing to stay in the frontier game.
(I do think 3.7 flash was a solid release, so they are around the conversation. And their image and audio and live models are good)
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 1212 ms ] threadhttps://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
1/5th the price of Astra and Fable
The price is enticing for cost per tasks, but let's see how it goes.
I have montly (cheapy) sub to gemini models and has been underwelming and lowered the tier.
$10 per million output tokens isn't improving on frontier price?
So, like any optimal game theory move, they are better off not starting a price war
https://firstpagesage.com/reports/top-generative-ai-chatbots...
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/chatgpts-market-share-slip...
OpenAI and Anthropic are existential threats to Google and it will operate accordingly.
Sol 6.1 scores one point less than Gemini 4 on intelligence AND costs less than half ($0.72 vs $1.99) per task.
Additionally, if you are using OpenAI you have the option to pay a bit more and get Astra which - despite the benchmarks - does outperform Sol on some things.
Also, people are - rightly - very wary of Google's benchmaxxing tendencies. I think lots of people remember Gemini 3.0 (I think?) which benchmarked amazingly, but as soon as you used it would go off-track and needed constant babysitting if you wanted to use it for agentic work.
Gemini 4 Argon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49913571
https://imgur.com/a/h96yg5t
This is on a $20/mo paid plan :cry:
After being nowhere near the frontier for a long time, they are pre announcing a model that ranks 3rd, roughly on par with models today that are cheaper.
Good for them to think about releasing to stay in the frontier game.
(I do think 3.7 flash was a solid release, so they are around the conversation. And their image and audio and live models are good)