It’s more likely what the grandparent was saying, I’m reminded of Steve Yegge’s rant from 15 years ago and it seems like not a lot has changed.

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

maybe spend a bit more time on the numbers presented in the announcement, which are pretty great

It is insanely difficult vs any other new sass startup with a profile->api key.

I won't even bother typing out all the steps.

Oh and good luck figuring out model-api-names (same complaint higher up)

“What?” You ask?

Yes.

First thing there that got me was that all of my Google searches. Why? I googled "snoop dog real name". Why is this considered a gemini chat now? If I actually used it, my chats would be buried under dumb quick google searches I did. And it seems its only my phone searches, not alL?

I assume because some PM will say "we have 1243153344% more Gemini searches than last quarter", then gonna get paid 3 million USD bonus for something that ruined the UX.

Then, I looked at the top and didnt find the model dropdown. It is next to the input, okay. I click it. Argon? Locked. Even tho I pay for the API anyways and can use it via the API.

But lets continue.

My app stopped working 2 days ago for no reason - apparently, I needed to move to a "prepaid payment mode", which wasn't a problem for the last 2 years.

- I open the AI studio, the banner to update shows, then page reloads and it disappeared.

- I was like okay, lets see - checked billing, tried to top up. First time my bank's 2FA notification didnt come, so I rejected and tried to top up. Then it would reuse the same windows as before with rejections. Okay, I refresh, topup, it works. I try to open usage to see my usage, but I can't see the spend there in any currency besides tokens.

- Now let me try it out. I type in the prompt, select the model, hit enter. Oh wait, I have to link the API key. I click the button, a dialog opens, then closes itself without any information. The prompt? There is no prompt anymore, you have to type it out yourself.

While I believe in Google's AI offering - I use their models and for my niche they are the best for good quality at great speeds.

But holy shit, every time I use one of their products, I just get annoyed. While Logan and AI studio team have really done some big improvements, the overall Google offering is confusing as hell.

Why does a customer have to hear "Oh yeah, don't use Google Cloud now, use Vertex via Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform"? Because some PM chased a bonus?

The internal politics are definitely ruining any edge they might have.

Because apparently their Pro models had issues.

Wouldn't you rather a company be honest about that than hiding it from you?

The other end of the scale is Microsoft, where everything is Copilot.

Wow that's embarrassing ! Is there no "product owners" or people "fighting for the users" anymore at Google ?

wow pricing has gone way up

Not surprising that Cursor is better at charging money for something that isn't an ad.

Same for appliances or most products that are bought through a middleman rather than directly from the manufacturer.

honestly, this tier is the 4GB model that ships in chrome and runs locally

Just because you saw your friend move to a new country for a job doesnt mean you will make the same choices, even if you are similarly qualified.

Just. Yaknow. 100x the costs, at the least.

To be honest, if I were an LLM provider I would be wiring up my release process to be fully automated so within 10 mins of the last bit of fine-tuning it got released and a blog post posted.

Seems like Google could do it too.

Especially on their Plus tier for Gemini.

I think it's a fair concern that this might take weeks and trail Fable 5.5.

Outside their most successful products (YouTube, Android, GMail, Chrome, Search), their products are usually worse than their competitors (e.g. GMeet vs Zoom)

> the brand recognition

Of not maintaining/outright abandoning their products, and making Search worse over the years?

> most importantly a billion normies

ChatGPT has 1.2B weekly active users, all the normies know what ChatGPT is but don't know about Gemini (outside the "AI Mode" stuff)

It's best to start with a relatively clean GEMINI.md too. Many configs optimized for Claude doesn't work well because Argon didn't have those same failure modes.

It's sad to see Carbon releasing at the same pricing because that implies Google is planning to do the thing everyone is doing: release promising model for subjective preference, RL-maxx a V2, replace promising V1 with V2 because it benchmarks better

Muse did it, Kimi did it, Deepseek did it, Tencent did it. No one seems to care abojt subjective preference anymore.

Top is Opus 5.5, followed by Fable.

[1] https://github.com/bottomless/agent-duel

This might be the first comment I've ever seen saying something nice about the model.

I don't understand why HN is so surprised to have an announcement for model existence and a follow-up announcement for model availability. It's really not that unusual, as you say Anthropic has done the same, probably others too (though I can't remember)

for whom?

https://files.catbox.moe/2aqfk7.webp

(Edit: For some reason the previous jpeg link: https://files.catbox.moe/yjqa0a.jpeg wasn't working and catbox.moe was just downloading 4kb white screen so I converted the image to webp and reuploaded it on catbox)

It's possible Fable is better, but since it word salads more quickly, it's hard to tell.

Opus 5.5 in comparison is a bit more verbose and appears to settle on evaluations before the depth reached by Fable on very complex stuff, but is still vastly capable and I can read its output without wishing it had a physical form I could punch in the face.

I generally use Fable for high-level blueprinting, architecture, and technical planning, and I tell it to write most of its documentation in a way Opus 5.5 will understand and maximally benefit from; with the added prompt for Opus to concede when a task would be better off to bring Fable back in. I've had ZERO problems.

https://file.garden/auI5UdLIWwZSu5X8/pilestone.png - result of said simulation.

  > "Edit this image to color code the benchmarks scores using a gradient scheme that is immediately obvious"

https://share.gemini.google/g6LC7spTH0cO

But I come from a latin language background, so maybe I'm a bit biased there.

Leopard (10.5) and Yosemite (10.10) both came with clear version numbers

Model X and Model Y are siblings which do not have a clear hierarchical relationship

Gemini 4 Carbon and Gemini 4 Argon are rather difficult for me to tell at a glance

Same for Anthropic, consistent model tier naming reused across model generations.

Those are just like i3/i5/i7 or M-series Pro/Max/Ultra.

But Carbon seems to be full replacement of Argon announced two weeks ago, they're same price. So Argon doesn't mean anything, they just picked random element.

Helium < Neon < Argon < Krypton < Xenon in increasing order, all very cool names.

Google went with the alphabetical order instead, which is less meaningful than the version numbers for the average user.

Maybe it thought the names are clear and intuitive (for an LLM perhaps).

There are no good elements for D; Dysprosium is the only one, and it's a mouthful. There are no good elements for E; Europium is the only one and would seem political. Is Fluorine their next release? (And then Gallium or Gadolinium?)

After Carbon, they should just update to Gemini 4.1 or 4.5 or whatever, and drop the random unrelated elements.

It has a seperate weekly limit that is very low. Maybe it can be pulled off that usage tier and just regular usage since Carbon is being released?

But it just all seems so tedious when codex and Claude are so painless.

Unfortunately their plan structure is on par with their model naming.

The plans that allow for own domain and the plans that allow for sane AI use are mutually exclusive

I suspect they're using a new naming convention because they had previous contractual obligations tied to the "pro" and "flash" naming, and by switching to a new naming schema they avoid those commitments.

personally i like 4 Argon, it's very clever for me in a very different way comparing to the other two (especially via api) but when it comes to the google products.. sigh. nobody who's actually working on these products really cares about them in google now (maybe notebooklm is the rare exception), they're either not dogfooding themselves or somehow intentionally poisoning the experience on purpose, or simply inqualified. poor gemini is suffering in agy i can tell, it struggles so much and wont even use simple tools properly. if you put it in any good 3rd party harness out there it's flexing way better than agy and this tells a lot.

Does that mean Anthropic now has a copy of Google's source code?

[EDIT]: thanks to people in the know for their answers.

Follow-up question:

if Anthropic models run in a Google cage, does that not also mean Google can distill Anthropic models even easier (both fast and unseen)?

And do you have advice on how best to use Gemini models? It seems like my usual strategy of iterating on plan md file -> implement based on plan doesn't seem to work, 3.8 tends to rewrite the plan too often removing crucial parts when iterating.

Gemma = small model Gemini = big model

Gemini 4 = latest model.

Gemini 4 Aragon = ?? Gemini 4 Carbon = ??

Argon - 18

Boron - 5

Carbon - 6

I don't think I'll be able to cope with this level of elemental disorder.

I tried to figure out if I could reproduce Carbon's aggregate score using yesterday's (v4.3.2's) benchmark weights—but apparently you can't actually do that, without paying AAI. The raw numbers going into that aggregate aren't available on their public website.

I’ve heard from multiple labs that model release is up to the US government now.

You can also see this with Astra being announced and then launched a few days later.

I don't buy it.

SpaceX is not exactly a small corporation, and they nevertheless strike me as far less risk-averse than GOOG and they deal with actual hardware that actually effing explodes.

This isn't about a "slip up", it's the modus operandi for Google since it was young. Press releases instead of real releases. I can't count the number of times I've clicked on a "launch" story from Google on HN only to end up on a blog post with an embedded youtube video, and nothing else. Google just doesn't get it, and this is one of the many ways that manifests.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50277040

Sort of? Yes, OpenAI has been bad about slow rolling but Anthropic's last few models have been available essentially at the same time as they announced it. In most cases I updated Claude Code and was using the new model right away.

Compare that to OpenAI who sometimes says "Available to all Plus/Pro/etc plans" without saying anything about "rolling out" and then it's a crap-shoot on when access will actually roll out. That said, they have gotten better, it used to be 1-3 weeks sometimes to get a new model/feature they announced was available for your plan.

And then there is Google... Who loves to talk about models like this and then give no timeline for release. Even when they do release the models it's miserable to find out how to even use it. Is it in the API? Which API? Google Cloud/Vertex/Gemini Cloud? Whatever it's called this week? Coding plan?

No, what Google does (or rather fails to do) in its rollouts does not compare to OpenAI/Anthropic.

As for the AA page, it's just embarrassing. Any smaller company doing that would get roasted, Google doesn't get a pass, learn how to coordinate or wait for something to actually be true/live before posting.

Gemini 4 Argon (at best Sonnet/Terra level) meanwhile took weeks to “come out” after their public announcement and when it finally did, paying Google AI plan users couldn't access Argon on Gemini or Antigravity even a week after. Three weeks from announcement to accessible for paying customers is not standard outside Google and this has been a problem with every Gemini release for the last year, so even using governmental requirements as an excuse isn’t possible here.

I will say that I dislike how OpenAI releases model only for Work and Codex but not via Chat, Anthropics "everywhere all at once" strategy is I feel the most user friendly.

So if they are still vetting and changes can thus happen, that'd mean the score could change for better or worse. Not sure they'd want the embarrassment of a #1 score changing after announcement.

I don't think I'm selfish, so that leaves me with naive or ignorant, I guess.

Are you saying when you use Argon in antigravity it has generous token usage? I forget if I tried it with antigravity but my experience with using it as a chat bot was the usage limit was terrible.

The ordering seems to be based on size?

I actually like the google one. Alphabetical categories. Essentially alpha beta without the existing connation.

I think the bigger problem it’s getting harder to order models linearly. As later versions of the model make different tradeoffs across dimensions.

4 > 3.8 > 3.1 > 3.0

Unless you put Flash onto it, which denotes a lower cost version.

It seems like Carbon is a drop in replacement for Argon (same price). They can keep using random cutesey names as long as the version number + Flash naming scheme keeps making sense. Feels Android-y to me.

So no, OAI scheme is also confusing as hell. And they are going to add even more confusion when they release presumably Nova.

Mythos > Fable ? Opus > Sonnet > Haiku

Tho I think it’s definitely not obvious at first glance. And requires some thinking to order if you are even familiar with the terms in the first place (I had to look up opus)

That's fairly obvious to me. Most people associate Myth with the gods, which are kind of the biggest and most powerful things we can imagine.

Not so much of a stretch...