For OAI and Anthropic releases we usually get a "pelican" here in the comments pretty (suspiciously) quickly, which then also happens to be on top of the comments. I always found that pretty weird given that's not an actual model "evaluation". It's provocative and gets the people going, I guess.
This happens not so much when Google or other labs release (not even on the Argon release post, afaik). Make of that what you will. Not sure if Google is sending a nod or a wink... ;-)
Just checked my Gemini app, still only have 3.1 Pro, 3.6 Flash and 3.6 Thinking on Pro. Looks like it's Ultra only.
They've been so slow to update their top models and roll them out that despite subscribing to the Gemini Pro plan, I use it so rarely that this is my last month. That and their product offering was so confusing I basically gave up.
When's the last time you checked what is offered by the plus subscription? It's been a while now that it's the equivalent to ChatGPT Go (on price and offer), giving only increased limits but no difference in model access compared to free.
When I switched from the Pro to the Plus subscription, they did not state anything to that effect. I expected a smaller quota of their most recent flash models, and instead I got models that are so old they are useless to me, so I canceled the subscription.
It is the lack of transparency that gets me. With PAYG open-weight models, I know exactly what I get for my money.
The Google One site lists all the tiers and their access levels. You didn't bother to check, and call the lack of a nag-screen a "lack of transparency?"
They just took 3.1 pro away from me while I was asking about Cami Clark and Epstein (for due-dilligince), lol. Now I have access to 3.6 Flash and 3.5 flash-light. So I canceled my sub. Shame. I used to love using antigravity when the allowance was good.
I say the same thing on every thread. For 23e a month on ChatGPT I get access to the top models, almost always day one. I might not get a huge amount of usage but I get to use the flagship and try things out. On AI plus for the same price I get basically nothing, and models that are 6-9 months old. I don't understand why google is not using their size and leverage to get these models into consumers, with a useful harness and take market share.
It's not their business. Anthropic and OpenAI don't have millions of phones in the wild blasting the ever-loving hell out of Luna or Haiku to create timers and search contacts. They probably made Carbon just to help distill the next Gemini Flash. They are fine letting a _few_ people use it, maybe, but I bet they are also fine if no one does. Worst case for them is probably a bunch of $20 subs building things with their top model and taking compute away from Pixel 11 calendar searches or google.com "summaries".
This sounds an awful lot like Yahoo not needing to compete with Google on search because they have the most valuable "web property".
ChatGPT and Google compete in the same market: a text box that answers your questions. The text box provider who can best answer the most difficult questions always wins because users don't care who they ask their easy questions to. Being a low-end text box provider is not a business model: providers either compete at the high-end or die.
Is it location specific? I have AI Pro plan and I have had Gemini 3.8 Flash for months, and I got Argon about two weeks ago in Antigravity, and now I also have Argon in the Gemini app.
There is something to be said about the fact that Google tomorrow could release the greatest performing, most efficient, comprehensively capable LLM of all times and even if you are a paying customer of theirs, you could not access it across their interfaces. Not even going to mention the announcement to release delay, which given the numbers don't seem to have changed, I cannot comprehend why they'd do.
Checked my ultra and it’s there now. Too afraid to use it though since my quota would drop like a rock, maybe on Friday if I have enough percentage left over.
Update your Gemini app if its not up to date. You should have access to Argon on the Pro plan. Just keep in mind only Ultra has access to Argo/Carbon in Antigravity IDE.
> Using Google Antigravity’s /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game where you explore Google’s Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike
Out of curiosity, have you noticed being redirected to flash models recently?
I've not been able to get a _single_ response from Argon in over a week, no matter what or when I ask. I also usually am active later in the evening so figured this would be post peak activity anyway.
I haven't. I usually use it during the day US time zone. I get redirected to flash when I run out of usage on the Gemini web page, which has a separate usage meter from the agy weekly usage. I haven't run into it ok the agy CLI that I use more often at night tho not a ton
Looks like it's the same price as Argon on openrouter, which is good to see. Probably was announced already somewhere that I missed.
It's interesting that Opencode Go got Argon, I'm hoping they'll get Carbon as well. They claim that Argon is ZDR on their platform. That's surprising to me because openrouter doesn't have ZDR endpoints for Google's models any more, due to a change in policy.
With Plus subscription this is in the list of available models, but says: "Unavailable - Gemini 4 Carbon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers."
What’s the difference between /boost, /teamwork, and now /swarm?
Anecdotally with Argon it would cut corners when attempting to one shot complicated prompts. Adversarial review would find hardcoded hacks and even bugs in physics code.
/teamwork did help with that but made it take EVEN LONGER
I’m hoping Carbon (with /swarm?) is going to help me with my physics and engineering. I don’t like having to cross check with Claude or Sol just to trust the results.
I had some reasonable success running teamwork with argon orchestrator, 3.8 Flash implementor subagents, and follow up Argon/flash subagents running uno-reverse skill, mixed up with /goal
Seems like as soon as there is any post about Gemini there are knee jerk reactions about how either you can't use it because it's not released (you can - it is released), you can't use it because you can't buy it (you can - consumer plans or API or just even OpenRouter), or that it hallucinates worse than other models (not according to https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience that actually says it is SOTA in this regard).
I've used 3.8 flash a lot as my daily driver (...eagerly awaiting flash 4 or whatever it ends up getting called Zirconium or Caesium or something other nonsense I am sure) and I can't say I've noticed any significant hallucination issues that everyone seems to think are so prevalent.
Just want to say I find Carbon waaay better than Argon.
I keep noticing google model sumbissions on hackernews getting targetted by systematically negative comments.
> Using Google Antigravity’s /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game where you explore Google’s Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike — coordinating subagents to model 3D assets in Blender from Omni and Nano Banana references, build the browser game in Three.js with WebGL shaders, and pair procedural Web Audio sound effects with Lyria music.[1]
Amazing, can we now close this pelican benchmark and move on to different things?
Google makes it really hard to try their models.
Guys, let me try it on pro or whatever sub. If I like it I will pay you more. I am already paying Anthropic 600 bucks a month and will pay more the moment they offer higher tier sub (I have 3x Ultra now) but I downgraded my Google sub because it's just so hard to try anything from them and it takes forever from the announcement to land in the app.
I use both. I've been very impressed with Argon High on the $20 plan so I just upgraded to the $100 plan to try Carbon. On Argon high, on a 4 hour flight, I was able to build a pipeline to help us train a decision model off qwen3.5-9b and integrate the new flow into a rather complex codebase we have. I had previously tried with Opus 5.5 and was never happy enough with the output to productionalize it.
I have google AI plus because of drive storage and it’s ridiculous that the best model this gives access to is 3.6 flash, not even the latest flash model. Google either needs to stop this being branded anything “AI” or make better models available if this is what the entrance subscription gives
I got ai plus just before discovering gemini 4 is not included in the plan, of course it's not useful for me lol (I'm quite sure this was advertised, but not like, big characters saying you won't have access to the best models, just somewhere where it mixes with other things). Good thing I got it for free as a student
I was benchmarking 3.6-3.8 and it seems like they just tuned thinking levels to have higher token consumption. For example 3.6 medium was equivalent to 3.7 low. Your comment seems to support that
I am saying that 3.6 to 3.7 there was nothing new except for moving the ladder by one step. Low was removed, medium became low, …
Initially I thought going from 3.6 to 3.7 will improve the model somehow while keeping the same speed/price characteristics but in fact it was the same if I just set 3.6 to medium - paying more to google.
99 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNbkThtNzS8
This happens not so much when Google or other labs release (not even on the Argon release post, afaik). Make of that what you will. Not sure if Google is sending a nod or a wink... ;-)
https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2120198811297694192
They've been so slow to update their top models and roll them out that despite subscribing to the Gemini Pro plan, I use it so rarely that this is my last month. That and their product offering was so confusing I basically gave up.
It is the lack of transparency that gets me. With PAYG open-weight models, I know exactly what I get for my money.
The Google One site lists all the tiers and their access levels. You didn't bother to check, and call the lack of a nag-screen a "lack of transparency?"
"Access to 3.1 pro" and they read it as "Access to Gemini Pro models".
Turns out when Google names a model in that subscription, they mean that model, not necessarily that class of model :/
ChatGPT and Google compete in the same market: a text box that answers your questions. The text box provider who can best answer the most difficult questions always wins because users don't care who they ask their easy questions to. Being a low-end text box provider is not a business model: providers either compete at the high-end or die.
They created the LLM!
It’s just bureaucracy, they’re not escaping involution
AI plus is $4.99. AI Pro would be the equivalent at $19.99, and it gives you access to Argon (assuming 23e means €23)
Immensely more expensive than a sub.
pelicanmaxxing is here.
I've not been able to get a _single_ response from Argon in over a week, no matter what or when I ask. I also usually am active later in the evening so figured this would be post peak activity anyway.
What's the recommended coding harness I should be using to test it out? (Recommended by folks here, not by Google...)
Argon was announced 30 September, publicly available 13 October. Carbon announced 28 October, publicly available 10 November.
It's interesting that Opencode Go got Argon, I'm hoping they'll get Carbon as well. They claim that Argon is ZDR on their platform. That's surprising to me because openrouter doesn't have ZDR endpoints for Google's models any more, due to a change in policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)
Anecdotally with Argon it would cut corners when attempting to one shot complicated prompts. Adversarial review would find hardcoded hacks and even bugs in physics code.
/teamwork did help with that but made it take EVEN LONGER
I’m hoping Carbon (with /swarm?) is going to help me with my physics and engineering. I don’t like having to cross check with Claude or Sol just to trust the results.
I made something simple & transparent named Switcheroo: https://github.com/FTCHD/switcheroo
Works with other AI CLIs like Gemini, and other various CLIs like Vercel (if you're managing multiple accounts like me), Netlify, Github etc
Seems like as soon as there is any post about Gemini there are knee jerk reactions about how either you can't use it because it's not released (you can - it is released), you can't use it because you can't buy it (you can - consumer plans or API or just even OpenRouter), or that it hallucinates worse than other models (not according to https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience that actually says it is SOTA in this regard).
I've used 3.8 flash a lot as my daily driver (...eagerly awaiting flash 4 or whatever it ends up getting called Zirconium or Caesium or something other nonsense I am sure) and I can't say I've noticed any significant hallucination issues that everyone seems to think are so prevalent.
Amazing, can we now close this pelican benchmark and move on to different things?
Google branding strikes again
I wonder if they still offer cheaper non-AI Google One plans. I'd rebrand AI Plus as a storage plan with some free AI add-ons...
Initially I thought going from 3.6 to 3.7 will improve the model somehow while keeping the same speed/price characteristics but in fact it was the same if I just set 3.6 to medium - paying more to google.