Gemini 4 Argon (deepmind.google)

why? is it not so good on that? or is there something better performance, or better price for same performance?

Given FelonyBench, do we also have a FantasyBench?

noooooooo

The results are a bit disappointing given Googles scale and training data.

The results are on par with cheaper Chinese open source models to be frank. https://cliphou.se/benchmark/

I'm not entirely sure you're correct. Your claim boils down to "Writing natural human prose" vs "Broad use of complex software and spatial awareness". My gut feeling is that there's more untapped and fruitful applications in the second group than the first - at least in the short term.

They had gemini cli, what happened to that? Was fine

Is there anybody in Google having a look at how bad and complicated their payment system is? In all the other AI providers you just sign in, pay, get a key, done. In other clouds like AWS, you add a card, pay little to verify the card the first time, monthly bill, done. In Google it looks like you have to fight them every time for the very thing they should make as easy as possible: opening your wallet.

I would also advise against buying Gemini if you have any other Google services, because you get banned across board if they don't like something. To use Google it's best to first migrate off of Google.

Otherwise great product, I really like and would recommend Gemini. The usage is also very generous, at least Flash models.

i live in French Polynesia, a French territory, i'm a Google AI subscriber and i can't use Google AI Studio or antigravity cli because i'm in a geo restricted area ...

It seems Google has no issue laying out cables across the Pacific Ocean from/to Tahiti, they don't have an issue selling their services and plans there but i can't use AI Studio or antigravity cli because of geo restrictions ...

- Try in Gemini

- Try in Google AI Studio

- Try in Google Antigravity

Will non users of Google products even know what these three things even are?

What you did isn’t wrong, but is unfortunately very similar to what real scammers do. The heuristics behind these anti-abuse efforts are always going to have false positives.

Ended up with Soniox instead, took minutes to get started.

They made using it so hard/unclear that myself and every other dev I knew gave up.

It's clear that they still haven't done any organizational self-reflection.

They now ask for your mobile number during signup. And it wouldn't let me register any more accounts with my number. So frustrating.

"Unavailable · Gemini 4 Argon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers."

That said, asking Gemini.google.com to walk you through the steps seems to suffice. In fact, one of AIs big perks for me is walking my through kafkaesque systems like Google’s to cut the shit and get to the result

$2/million input and $10/million output today. $4/$20 after December 1st.

+1. FWIW, I didn't even get far enough to wonder about the price.

The lead (and only) sentence states "Our next era of frontier intelligence, built to solve your hardest problems" a statement equally true of any new Google or competitor model, hence completely devoid of useful meaning. I then kept scrolling down... and down... and down, giving up after a half dozen screens of big images, huge videos and some customer stories. The first sentence of every text block was equally vague or meaningless so... tv;dr (Too vague, didn't read).

Even the Gemini sub-reddit is laughing: https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1x2dr47/the_lates...

It might not be as smart, though my employer gives me access to Claude, so I tried giving the same task to Opus 5.5. Both DS4.1 Flash and Opus5.5 produced nearly identical outputs.

After that, my company switched the entire engineering department to Azure hosted DeepSeek4.1 and costs were cut by 3/4. So far, no one has really noticed the change.

For chat, yes. But switch to code on the same page, and the picture changes. OpenAI takes the lead.

(Chrome, also incognito)

> If it's on HN and is a meme at this point, it will end up in the training set.

> It's kind of fun to imagine that there is an intern in every AI company furiously trying to get nice looking svg pelicans on bicycles.

Google listened and assigned a few interns, I guess, for the task

Modern models can make nearly photorealistic games in threejs. So why do they struggle with these pelicans?

Subtle highlights on the metal frame, sweat beads, jaunty little hat…it has style. At least compared to the rather literal ChatGPT outputs. https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-pelicans-gr...

It's a simple manner of prompt...generate concept art with nanobanana, measure, llm creates svg with text, measure the distance between rasterized svg embedding to nanobanana art....do post-training RL on a 3 million such images and matching embeddings.

I swear this will be a canonical example of Goodhardt's Law in action.

You have to switch to a new benchmark that isn't so easy to run a verifiable rewards pipeline on...Perhaps a longer horizon task where it's easy to mess up midway.

As one point, the high pelican's arm is see-through/messed up.

They do look worlds better than previously, to be fair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican#/media/File:Pelikan_Wa...

Give me reverse engineering bench and agentic coding.

Leave making visuals to humans who actually have aesthetic sense unlike whatever made this mess

I note that even these bikes are not actually rideable. For a bike to be stable, the front wheel axle needs to extend forward a little ahead of the fork - the fork must ”bend forwards”. This is what actually keeps the bike upright, not gyroscopic effects or some such. Given LLMs are generally good at basic maths, im surprised they get this wrong.

Maybe a bit less so in this case though. As per the announcements, the model was actually trained for this prompt, so was fed some training data. I can well imagine the data there was just not so good.

wasn't the whole point of pelicans is that labs *wouldn't* train for that?

so now the benchmark is ruined

Also, that first tweet contains a commentary that, for me, explain a lot about the public misconception about how current AI works:

> wait, does this mean you guys are actively training svg generation? i was mostly amazed by it thinking the models doing better at it by itself due to becoming better at reasoning.

No, it's not better reasoning that drives current AI, it's better examples we have been giving them. Whole army of people generating content for the frontier labs.

Also, reasoning improving the out of distribution part, like computer use, tool use etc.

<https://tools.simonwillison.net/svg-render#%3Csvg%20font-fam...> <https://tools.simonwillison.net/svg-render#%3Csvg%20font-fam...>

- I was having trouble embedding the SVGs as links, and ChatGPT recommended Simon Willison's SVG Renderer as a workaround.

Just my 2 cents on the pelicans benchmark: I think it might help if you were a bit more explicit about not taking this one benchmark too seriously. I know you say that at times, but at other times (such as the comment I'm replying to) you elide it which can read as a seriousness about the benchmark.

Argon: https://jonclegg.github.io/pacman-bakeoff/dev/#gemini-4-argo...

Opus 5.5 https://jonclegg.github.io/pacman-bakeoff/dev/#claude-opus-5...

Argon is trying to solve the "hard" problems like those.

It looks like you've managed to decode it? Is that legit?

What kind of progress was made with Argon with the Voynich?

But id the progress of decoding it is legit, you should write something properly about it!

Or else it say, here is the result. (but no it didn't do no research, and tells me, sorry I forgot to search).

It's got balls to lie straight at my face.

They all ramble, they're all allergic to getting to the point. But, Gemini historically has pretty good prose. Even the self-hosted Gemma models have pretty nice, inoffensive prose. I wouldn't want to read a novel written by any of them, but I tend to ask Gemini questions in chat more often than Claude or GPT, because it has good prose and is good at using the web to research.

Unique users, maybe. But a simple query that's answered in a paragraph is negligible compared to devs running agents continuously for tens of hours.

Astra 5.6 is significantly better than Google Argon 4 and a lot better than Claude Fable

https://generative-ai.review/2026/10/catchup-openai-astra-5-...

edit: It failed on the second prompt and they disabled it now.

https://one.google.com/about/google-ai-plans/?icid=microsite...

It doesn't show in the desktop UI.

> Gemini 4 Argon (Medium)

  Unavailable · Gemini 4 Argon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers.

    Antigravity CLI 1.3.4
    [My account email] (Google AI Ultra)
    Gemini 4 Argon (High)
    ~/[working folder]

  > /model
    ⎿  Model set to Gemini 4 Argon (High)

Related funny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlTNN0gvkLM

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