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points by isqueiros 17 hours ago | 0 comments

I'll use this opportunity while it's still early to share my experience with Argon.

I got it via the "Pro" plan, exclusively for personal task usage. So no agentic programming.

For starters, the limits are dreadfully low. Five messages on medium is already enough to trigger a 4 hour cooldown. Secondly, the best part is the integration with Google search and Maps. Makes it seamless for trip planning. Lastly it's the only "SOTA" model in a long time that has actively hallucinated details. I don't know if it's because the Gemini harness is not asking it to verify information, but I've had some real Deepseek V3-like lies in responses.

Either way, I find it difficult to get invested in Gemini because nobody will have access to Carbon for a few months anyways.

[–] SoMomentary 17 hours ago

I similarly had Argon respond with a vast hallucination. It surprised me because it wasn't a little wrong on the details but a fully false verbose response that completely fabricated fabricated everything. I'd recently had Claude Code help me create transcripts for some audio notes from my mother in law and decided to see how some other models would handle the same task sans harness. Argon made up a long conversation from a police sting operation with under cover operatives seemingly just because it read the file names and identified that they would have come from a recording device.

Honestly the fiction writing was pretty impressive!

[–] dcss_gardener 16 hours ago

Suddenly very curious what the llm roleplay people think about this one lol. Fortunately I've already learned to stifle my curiosity on that specific subject.

[–] bananaflag 16 hours ago

It seems a strangely underdiscussed topic on HN.

[–] mcbuilder 16 hours ago

It goes way back, I work in AI/Ml (taken over by transformers/LLMs) space since early days of this "AI Summer". We get some nice grad school students interning from top universities. I met one during a trip to the office, from top notch school, introduced me to Triton programming when it first came out. It was early days of LLaMA just coming, when The Bloke was regularly dropping finetunes, I was joking asking him what the hacker stack was for "AI waifus" that the cool kids were using. Lo and behold he drops the name of the SillyTavern project. Which later was really educational in setting up local inference servers and in other ways, may have had to, ahem, delete some browser history.

[–] pontes 15 hours ago

I will try here: https://myownlore.com :)

But my experience is that the agent matters a bit more than the model. It is fun on ChatGPT because of its recent (?) bias to always be creating images for conversations around fiction.

[–] carterschonwald 14 hours ago

what are some of the vagaries of how that use case depends on the agent aka harness? i’ve only been focused on sort of how to make models reliable for my math / cs / engineering and arts and crafts work loads, but RP is an important category for some folks. like are the fails of the various models different from more technical yet creative work loads?

eg im working on rigorizing a proof that a fun algorithm of mine is not only the first provably efficient algorithm for a particular problem, but its also the fastest in practice. ive found that for the sort of stuff i need to assume the model will get confused in the out of training distribution stuff from my personal library of ideas, so they will at best be a confused secretary intern mashup

[–] staticman2 16 hours ago

If you uploaded the audio via the web site or app and got terrible results I'd bet Argon wasn't the model doing the transcribing. The only way to know for sure is to try again with the API.

[–] SoMomentary 9 hours ago

Oh it definitely didn't transcribe anything at all! This was through the WebUI. I'm certain it would have done better through Antigravity or such. Really I was just expecting a denial but I figured what the hell, the files are small and I like to see how the results of various models compare.

[–] cannonpalms 14 hours ago

Very wise of you to keep MIL receipts. You never know when you might need them...

[–] MattRogish 13 hours ago

Yes! I was having Argon summarize some project updates and it... just made up entire paragraphs that had no basis in reality. It felt like I was back in GPT3 days.

Will have to give Carbon a try, but if it is anything like what I saw before it was entirely unusable.

[–] m11a 17 hours ago

Yeah... Given that everyone else seems to make models available either immediately or within days of announcement, idk why Google feels it's competitive or acceptable to do these 'available at some point' releases.

Capabilities are also improving so fast that this fomo doesn't really keep people excited. If I can't run it, I'll sorta just click off. And given how they handled the Argon release, I've not even bothered look at this Carbon one. Fully expected it to not be usable yet.

[–] WarmWash 16 hours ago

The other labs do the same process, but they don't announce the model until it is about to be released. For some reason Google is announcing at the start of th process.

[–] _delirium 16 hours ago

Didn't Anthropic also announce Mythos at the start of the process, five months before public release?

[–] ncruces 15 hours ago

People who are already using it (both internally and/or select partners) can speak more freely about it if it's announced.

This is especially true around earnings, not necessarily for some sinister reason, other than it's material information that can influence the market.

[–] ptero 16 hours ago

My guess is Google knows it is (way) behind the and needs to keep drumming up interest. Although at some point it becomes counterproductive (raising "yet another not available model; is it vaporware" vibes).

[–] vessenes 15 hours ago

Deepmind has over a decade of DNA of not releasing - it's a significant cultural difference.

[–] notatoad 15 hours ago

argon was announced to coincide with performance review deadline. carbon was announced to coincide with quarterly earnings release.

they don't really care how end-users will receive these models, they're just announcing for internal targets.

[–] ecshafer 15 hours ago

> argon was announced to coincide with performance review deadline. carbon was announced to coincide with quarterly earnings release.

Same as it ever was. Google is really completing their IBM-ification. We need to release these models now because year end reviews are about to hit and I need a win.

[–] sidewndr46 16 hours ago

Creating a false sense of scarcity is essential to get people talking about it. I get almost endless inquiries from peers now that I have access to Mythos.

[–] KoolKat23 15 hours ago

I'm not sure about this. I myself am curious about this model, but not for my own use. I've already written it off as too expensive. The money won't be flowing their way regardless.

[–] ltbarcly3 15 hours ago

It's late in life to learn this, but let me be the one to let you in on a little secret: people often say only some of the things they know, they often selectively tell you things while not revealing everything they know.

You are assuming that Carbon is ready for release, deployed to their datacenters, that all scaling and other issues have been worked out, and they are confident in all of the above. Not to mention additional internal constraints like alignment testing or other safety procedures their own policies and guardrails require.

If they are smart, which they clearly have some smart people if they are making the best frontier model, they would account for the above needs in their timeline, and announce the model when they can prove they have it but also before they are ready to release it. This is so they can be at the top of the frontier model lists, boost their brand for both Gemini and Google, get the bump in stock price and investor confidence, steer adoption decisions for people making decisions for what platform they might adopt, etc.

[–] dude250711 17 hours ago

I don't think you are their target audience, unless you are in their promotions committee or a large holder of their stock.

The target is to make a celebratory announcement.

[–] pixl97 16 hours ago

Eh, maybe I'm too much of an AI safety person, but I'd rather the labs be forced to announce when they are working on large SOTA models like they are a clinical trial. That way if it's never announced they have to say something like "training didn't work out" or "it took over the server farm and we had to burn the hard disks".

[–] PunchTornado 15 hours ago

goog released it just before the earnings call. anthropic and openai don't have these issues.

[–] HarHarVeryFunny 14 hours ago

What's the betting we see another "dramatic" Anthropic release either shortly before the IPO, or at same time they release their Q3 results which were conveniently omitted from their S-1 filing.

[–] gnufied 17 hours ago

hmm, I haven't tried Carbon yet. But I have been using Argon on and off via agent-shell - https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell and unofficial ACP client.

In my limited usage, it has fixed issues which has not been correctly fixed by sol-6.1 (medium) - https://github.com/auto-gnufied/markdown-modern/commit/a189a...

I am also using it via Google pro tier and did not immediately run into quota issues. But as someone else said in previous discussion of this - Google Pro tier already includes lot of stuff (including Youtube premium etc), the AI plans are just a nice addon.

[–] aNapierkowski 14 hours ago

yeah thats basically the only reason i have the google AI plan YT Premium, increased drive/photos data, & home premium (though i may have that already tbh) Only using flash & argon for toy projects since its included though Argon availablity is very small, similar to the included claude usage avaialble in antigravity

[–] indigodaddy 15 hours ago

I might consider Google AI Pro if it had a family addition that included YT Premium Family, but alas it does not

[–] HarHarVeryFunny 14 hours ago

Interesting idea .. "Google Prime" including access to all their best stuff.

[–] kyrra 17 hours ago

> I find it difficult to get invested in Gemini because nobody will have access to Carbon for a few months anyways.

I feel like you're being overly dramatic here. Argon was 13 - 15 days.

Argon was announced September 30, made available on October 13 to Ultra everywhere, and Pro in the Gemini App. Pro plans got Argon on October 15 in AGY.

This is the first time they've slow-rolled a model. Who knows how long they'll wait on Carbon.

The Ultra-lite plans ($99/month) get some pretty good quota where you can actually use Argon some more. Maybe Google shouldn't be grouping together plans, but it should also be noted that $20/month also gets you 5TB of storage on Drive. If you paid for Dropbox, you get 3TB for $18/month (without any AI model usage).

(googler, opinions are my own)

[–] pu_pe 16 hours ago

If we go back only 45 days, Opus 5.5 was not even out yet. So for more than a third of the current SOTA model's existence, Google's response to it was under its own embargo. When it was finally out, paying users get 3-4 prompts a day, which means Argon will be experienced by a tiny minority of people, another unforced error on Google's side.

By the time Carbon comes out, I fully expect Anthropic, ChatGPT and/or a Chinese lab to have its answer ready to ship in less time than it took Google to approve a release.

[–] isqueiros 17 hours ago

Since you're a googler, can you trigger some internal process to improve the connection between google services?

Gemini cannot create "my maps". I like creating a map of stuff for travel and now I ask it to create an importable file (which it doesn't always get right) but it should honestly do that itself.

And I don't mean that from within the Gemini app, I'd like a shareable list of places, which you can do via a very outdated maps UI

[–] WarmWash 16 hours ago

>can you trigger some internal process to improve the connection between google services?

You might as well be asking an Adobe employee to bring up improving integration with Canva.

[–] isqueiros 14 hours ago

This would be true if Gemini didn't already have some surface level access with Google maps. They just stopped short of supporting the feature I cared about

[–] ghurtado 15 hours ago

What do you mean?

Doesn't every Googler have weekly meetings with Tim Google?

[–] brainwad 12 hours ago

We did, ten years ago. With open mics! Now TGIF is every other month and the questions are bowdlerised by an LLM first.

[–] seanmcdirmid 15 hours ago

You also get YouTube premium and home premium on the Google ultra plan. I didn’t realize how nice it was not to see ads on YouTube, and the home summary of who walked next to my home each day is bizarre. The grouping doesn’t make sense at all, since I would have bought it anyways, but it’s a nice bonus.

[–] jeffbee 15 hours ago

It's annoying that there is no way to just pay the marginal difference between Premium Lite and Premium for AI Pro subscribers. I have a bunch of interacting subsidies from Google Fi, Pixel phone purchases, and Google One AI Pro, but it's hard to keep them straight.

[–] seanmcdirmid 14 hours ago

Ya, it was kind of a mess for me also, I had to get support to put my accounts in order after I subscribed.

[–] jack_pp 16 hours ago

problem is, i don't care about the extra storage at all.

my whole family of 5 people is using in total 160 GB. personally I use about 15 GB

[–] lanstin 16 hours ago

I have 160G of screen captures from Tumblr from my then angsty teenage kid. I think my spouse takes a few Gig of photos for each outing we go on. Several people dress for fancy thing via a process involving many clothes changes and even more selfies.

[–] elictronic 15 hours ago

It’s hard to get interested in Google products because they throw them out all the time. If it’s not a step change in functionality why even go near their baggage.

[–] InsideOutSanta 17 hours ago

> For starters, the limits are dreadfully low.

That's the problem for me. Google can have the world's best model; it doesn't matter to me, because I effectively can't use it.

Both Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1 are extremely good and provide a lot of inference on their $200 plans, and then there are the Chinese models - DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, MiMo, and StepFun all offer a lot of value per cost.

At the moment, I don't see a niche where it makes sense to use Google's models, regardless of how good they are.

[–] seanmcdirmid 15 hours ago

Google has a $99 plan that I’m using right now and I found flash to be reasonable for dev, but I spent my now past career at Google working around Gemini Flash limitations (when it was much worse than it is now) and leveraging subagents in antigravity. I want to dip my toes into anthropic or openAI models, but getting setup seems to require either another plan or expensive tokens, and I’ve found DeepSeek to be a reasonable back up/second model that I’m not eager to just go in and see what I can do over there.

[–] rickydroll 16 hours ago

In my experience, (using 3.8 flash) the Google models do a fairly good job at summary notes and simple documentation (do this, do that). It doesn't seem to be as bad as Claude for producing headache-inducing text.

[–] zobzu 15 hours ago

3.8 flash is pretty good. it's not expensive, works great for reasoning tasks and it's fast.

for coding .. it works ok but i prefer the openai or anthropic models, much better results.

[–] rickydroll 14 hours ago

Good to know. I figured I'd start with Gemini because if I used Claude, I'd probably get addicted to the results. Then I would have to commission a velvet painting of me dressed in Dickensian beggar clothes with big eyes and a quivering lower lip, holding my hands out, asking for tokens.

[–] EbNar 17 hours ago

Same. I subscribed to Gemini pro and requested a refund literally the same day. Asked it to put a technical image on a presentation (gave it the image) and it kept generating a different image of a peaceful landscape... Yeah, very pleasant but totally unrelated.

[–] ez_mmk 17 hours ago

In my experience with antigravity-cli for coding Argon gets the task finished much faster than 3.8 Flash and with a higher quality output. The quotas on Pro are about 2 hours of usage per week for Argon. Its a really nice model to use. Only thing that is annoying is that it still struggles with tool use on the gemini website.

[–] Revanche1367 12 hours ago

I had been on the pro plan for a few months and recently upgraded to the $200.00 AI Ultra plan because I've gotten good mileage out of 3.8 flash while keeping in mind that it's far from perfect. Argon is better in my experience in terms of reliability (especially in not claiming to have done things it clearly didn't) but I have to agree with the hallucination part, for a "SOTA" model (before Carbon came out at least), it hallucinates significantly more even on moderately complex tasks compared to Astra or Opus while being much slower than 3.8 flash (as expected of course). Another irritating thing is that like the 3.6+ models (but thankfully less often), it has a nasty habit of sometimes recognizing unstaged changes in the branch as not being its own work (whether done manually or with another agent) and deciding to undo them or even delete files. That's something I don't expect any SOTA model to do without at least asking the user.

Gemini so far has also had terrible computer-use capability or tool-use capability compared to ChatGPT (haven't used enough of Claude for these tasks lately to really compare). I tell ChatGPT to make some formatting changes to a LaTeX file I gave it and generate a PDF, it get's the PDF generated most of the time; occasionally the download link doesn't work, but that seems to be a server or link-generation issue, the actual PDF is generated and it quickly fixes the broken link when told. With Gemini, it's a long struggle and I use LLMs for formatting LaTeX a lot, so sometimes if ChatGPT is doing some long-running task for me, I have to begrudgingly give the document formatting task to Gemini, and it's dreadful every single time.

Before Argon was a thing, it once generated a PDF file, then started claiming PDF generation was not part of its functionality and the link that was previously working stopped doing so. I think I had inadvertently jail-broken a functionality because it refused to generate PDFs again and said the first time was a mistake. With Argon, it doesn't deny having the capability, but it takes much longer than ChatGPT, and messes up more formatting than it fixes. Its PDF viewer is also trash and seems like it gets built from scratch every time you want to view a PDF.

[–] Aurornis 14 hours ago

> For starters, the limits are dreadfully low. Five messages on medium is already enough to trigger a 4 hour cooldown.

Is that chat messages that involve tool calls (web search, file reads, etc) or actually just messages?

When I'm on the $20/month OpenAI plan, I can get about 3-5 turns out of Astra before the 5 hour limit is up.

When Fable was on the $20/month Anthropic plan, I remember getting about the same.

3-4 turns out of the $20/month plan would seem about par with other providers for their best model, but really Carbon should occupy that slot, not Argon.

If Argon's limits are that low, it wouldn't make sense to use that plan for anything when models of similar intelligence are available with much higher limits on other $20 plans.

[–] smj-edison 16 hours ago

Agreed on the limits, they're quite frustrating. I've still been preferring Argon to Opus 5.5 though, because even though Argon gets details wrong, I find that it's much more creative and willing to explore ideas. In my experience Opus tends to be rather condescending and won't make room for less orthodox ideas to develop. For what I'm doing, I'd much rather have good ideas that I implement mostly by hand rather than regressing to the mean and have the LLM write the code.

[–] Gareth321 16 hours ago

>Lastly it's the only "SOTA" model in a long time that has actively hallucinated details. I don't know if it's because the Gemini harness is not asking it to verify information, but I've had some real Deepseek V3-like lies in responses.

I don't know what it is about Google models, but they are the worst at hallucinations. I don't understand how they can so consistently be this bad.

[–] jhanschoo 17 hours ago

Note that Argon was rolled out for IDEs for people on paid AI Pro on Oct 15/Oct 16 (a couple days after Ultra users), but of course, usage limits are extremely low

[–] XCSme 16 hours ago

> has actively hallucinated details

Gemini models always suffered from this. They were almost always best in terms of intelligence, but one of the worst to use in practice, because they have a lot of failure modes on simple tasks that simply give factually incorrect answers, or completely break and output gibberish.

[–] tekacs 15 hours ago

> because nobody will have access to Carbon for a few months anyways

From Google saying that Argon would be 'available soon' (as they did just now for Carbon), it took them 13 days to release it. So... unclear that Carbon won't see the same trajectory.

[–] logicchains 15 hours ago

In 13 days' time there'll likely be better Claude and OpenAI models available.

[–] zjbird 16 hours ago

It's kind of an odd release. Yes, it's technically the top intelligence model by like one point above Claude according to Artificial Analysis, but it's like barely cheaper?

It looks like the best sort of bang for your buck is still GPT Sol and GPT Astra. Claude and Gemini have just been going for that number one intelligence spot by sacrificing a lot of efficiency.

It does sort of show their hands a bit that their larger goals might be outside of just consumer sales but also seeking hyper intelligence that could bring value in new ways of discovery (if it ends up being a legit outlet for such things consistently)

[–] ramigb 16 hours ago

Yeah that "Pro" usage is a joke! I wish google paid more attention to what the people want! it's a shame I loved Gemini 2.5 and 3 when they first came out they were super amazing!

[–] fzeindl 16 hours ago

> Lastly it's the only "SOTA" model in a long time that has actively hallucinated details.

Yesterday I used Google AI-Search (so Gemini Flash 3.5?) for opinions on a traffic accident and it continously constructed law-interpretations and then referenced the wrong paragraphs. It talked about rules on road-crossings and cited paragraphs pertaining to alcohol intoxication as sources.

[–] nostrebored 17 hours ago

I have it on $200 Ultra and it feels like Opus 5.5 (I do not think about limits) rather than gpt-6* models where I constantly hit a wall.

[–] haolez 16 hours ago

Yeah, I thought it was just me - it hallucinates more than Flash, Flash-lite and Pro.

[–] lokelow 16 hours ago

I have experienced all of this too. I also find Argon still seems to have the sycophancy problem that some of the other labs have stamped out to a large degree.

[–] sidewndr46 16 hours ago

I had the same experience. 4 messages on medium triggers the cooldown. The utility isn't really relevant if you're on the Pro plan.

[–] npn 15 hours ago

same. I have Pro plan so I was pretty excited when Argon was released. But it was such a disappointment.

the problem with gemini is the whole app itself, not the model.

when you use other chat app, like chatgpt or deepseek chat, the app will use web search for everything to verify. and if it can not find anything useful, or the current fact is disputed, it will try to call web search tool again and again until the consensus.

meanwhile gemini will refuse to do web search if possible, and only do it a single time if demanded. worse, it uses the same result from google search, so the top ranking answers are almost all SEO garbage.

since then I just stopped asking gemini again. and I don't think the newer model will change the situation.

[–] crimsoneer 16 hours ago

It is expensive as hell. That said, on my weird personal benchmark (https://botbowlbench.com/) it reliably beats Opus 5.5, which surprised me a fair bit.

[–] wslh 17 hours ago

I am having a very positive experience with Argon: since it was launched I accessed it through Ultragravity and connected via a Google Cloud account. For one month I have been trying to move the needle in SHA256 cryptoanalysis with Claude to not avail and Argon moved "two needles".

Since then I tried it for experimenting on diverse fields. For example, this week there was a discussion here in HN about the non-continuation of Python funding on the JIT, so I "played" again to removing the GIL and moving to the JIT in Python, it did it. I played with many other things, even the Riemann Hypothesis (it just removed their rational parameter rounding only moves 0.875 towards 0.87495702, nothing significant though).

Many other relatively great things were done this week in parallel. I have some budget for research.

[–] yoz-y 15 hours ago

I’ve had good experience coding with it. In a bit of an ironical twist I now find Gemini a much better coder and Claude a much better search engine.

[–] 34679 16 hours ago

It's terrible. I tried it via API in OpenCode. It's so slow, and the lack of reasoning output makes it feel even slower. And I also noticed the lies. I gave it a high-res image of a map to classify labelled locations, and it started going on about how smart it was for the map creator to use squares as the symbol for one of the categories of labelled places, and gave me a list of all the places with squares along with their category, but the map has no squares. It's circles, triangles, and stars.

[–] scrollop 14 hours ago

Arena.ai has reviewed it using many tasks against SOTA models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO2I3ueVQrk&lc=UgxRXtipA3QbA...

tldr; it's not as good as opus 5.5

[–] pwython 16 hours ago

> Makes it seamless for trip planning.

Trip planning is the most often used use-case for agents/bots I see in marketing. I'm lucky to travel once a year, but if I did have a trip, I wouldn't feel comfortable letting an LLM take the wheel. Too many variables for wrong flight or room, closed locations in itinerary, etc.

Now, critical server infrastructure? Sure, have at it Claude, make no mistakes!

[–] isqueiros 15 hours ago

I would literally never let an AI plan my trip. I do have very specific interests though and it's nice to have an overview of suggestions of places to go.

Plus, it's great at researching the history of places you're visiting, so you can find cultural experiences a bit easier.

I don't travel often, but I do live in Europe where it's easy to visit a new city or country in the weekend. This makes this functionality a quite common use for me.

[–] m3kw9 17 hours ago

The best [whatever] is the one that is the most available.

[–] dgellow 17 hours ago

> Lastly it's the only "SOTA" model in a long time that has actively hallucinated details

Could you expand on this? I’ve never seen a frontier model that doesn’t hallucinate details fairly often, what do you mean by “actively” here?

[–] isqueiros 17 hours ago

I mean this specifically for general tasks, like personal research. Small stuff. I was asking for espresso machine recommendations and it literally came up with a non-existent machine that supposedly met all my requirements. I've never seen that with ChatGPT, Claude or Kimi. It's quite surprising how it did that _after_ doing a Google search.

[–] RestartKernel 13 hours ago

Gemini has been like that forever. Even when given the full manual of my bread baking machine, it still gave me the wrong program number; when I was lost at the airport, it gave me completely false directions, etc. Neither ChatGPT nor Claude has let me down like that in recent years.

The only thing Gemini has over those is integration with my Google account, which is genuinely useful. But I reckon Google could release open weights for their whole product line without affecting market share much.

[–] nullsanity 16 hours ago

Weird, using AGY I get tons of argon and its on a weekly limit.