Gemini 4 Carbon (blog.google)

If it's based on carbon-14 it will lose half its model weights in 5,730 years; if it's based on carbon-12, it's a stable release.

  O, B, Sc, U, Re?
  Ra, Nd?

or I'm dumb and its just elements with names starting with A, B, C

* 3.5 Flash-Lite

* 3.8 Flash

* 3.1 Pro

* 4 Argon - New

And honestly, the versions are hurting their case. I ask myself “how is the oldest model, the Pro model?”

This kind of bungled naming and versioning is the kind of thing I expect from Microsoft.

It is the most awful product experience I’ve had this year. How could they fuck it up this badly?

I'm fairly confident I can't call Carbon, and I am okay with that.

Now, I just go straight to the Hacker News comments. I've given up on trying to figure out how to navigate Google's labyrinth.

Their release notes have become like breakthroughs in graphene. I'll believe it when I see it.

Their go-to-market execution is just so broken.

At the beginning of this whole AI shift, when Google would announce a new model, I would try to get access, even paying for a subscription.

Then I realized it's just not possible.

Google onboarding is the new Gordian knot.

For Google, I think the announcement is the success criteria. And onboarding is somebody else's problem. And the problem is... that somebody doesn't work at Google, or are entirely disempowered.

If, someday, Hacker News comments indicate that a majority of individuals have figured out how to access these newly announced models consistently, I might take my precious personal time to navigate the labyrinth once more.

I needed batch mode. Oh but the key from service X doesn't support batch mode, you need to go service Y and btw there is no UI for that so you need to use an SDK or API (cant even remember anymore). Spend an hour figuring that out, then it turns out I can't use batch mode because I don't have permissions. Have boss spend an hour granting me permissions. Then service is unavailable every n requests for 5 minutes, so I have fuck with exponential back offs.

Glad to see they moved that experience to their consumer offerings lol.

As an example, Linux distros say, Ubuntu got its project "names" as well as SEMVERs. But people rarely use project names but uses versions.

You tell me, I use "Jammy Jellyfish". I will be like WTF dood. You tell me 22.04 LT (which is one I use), oh yeah, that's a good one.

Same thing here. companies can call whatever SOTA whatever they want. But in the end people will refer to them as just Gemini 4 or Ultr/Pro/Lite however people like to use.

Just leave it to company's discretion. Don't enforce anything. People will figure out how to call it.

---

And wtf, a peaseant?

I use your so-stupidly-called ultra/med/lite but in diff situations, and when I use lite that doesn't mean I am peasant, I am being sensible

Also the whole "we're only releasing it to cyber defenders first" framing is weird, is any Gemini model an actual cyber risk?

I suspect they're announcing it for two reasons: to get ahead of all the leaks; and because it's earnings report day.

Has there ever been a product category where a product release is valuable for a shorter time than with LLMs? Trying to build SOTA models seems like it'd be an exhausting hamster wheel to work on.

Google has the products, the brand recognition, the hardware, the data and most importantly a billion normies.

Google was always going to win this thing, although I wouldn't discount meta. The only thing that matters is mindshare and Anthropic and OpenAI have largely generated NEGATIVE sentiment, outside some fanboys.

Google and Meta can plop cute products into your daily driver apps and you wont know the difference.

On the other hand I'm a strong protan colorblind guy (red doesn't register to me very well at all).

[0] Practical Data (https://practicaldata.dev/ / https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/practical-data/oeoo...)

Also, I'm curious if you just asked an AI to _OCR the original image+update it_, or if you used a different process?

For me it also works the opposite way, when it actually comes out eventually it’ll already be old news.

It's worth trying if you have easy access to it (we use Cursor at work, so it was just a matter of picking a different model for me). Don't know if I'd go out of my way to get a Google AI subscription for it, but if Carbon ends up meeting these expectations, then it may be worth doing so.

Consequently, I have zero intention of renewing my Gemini subscription. What a dumb business choice they made.

Having said that, I don't see people excited about using Argon so far, so that might be why Google is announcing this to hype Gemini up a bit.

Anthropic has been doing this with Mythos for quite some time...

it actually did really well.

But it still annoys me: I told it to _tell_ me something, and instead it _implemented_ the something. The previous models were way too eager to just jump in and do and this one seems no different. But the optimization it identified was both really solid and just a good engineering choice, and better than what Opus had been suggesting.

It also gave pretty good feedback on a bit of writing.

Updates to your Google AI Plus plan

We wanted to let you know about changes to the models that you can access with your Google AI Plus plan.

Starting on 1 3 N o v e m b e r 2 0 2 6 , the ability to select Pro models in both the Gemini app and AI Mode in Google Search will only be available to Google AI Pro subscribers and above. You'll still have access to our latest Flash-Lite model and Flash, built for speed and intelligence. Your previous chats using the Pro model can be continued with a different model.

To learn more about these changes, you can visit our Help Centre article for additional details. You can manage or cancel your subscription at any time.

Thank you for being a Google AI Plus subscriber.

If you are talking about free versions, OpenAI and Anthropic also have a difference between free models and models available to 25$-tier plans.

Now you know why they released it just before the earnings call.... :-D

Argon is like Sonnet

Makes me think it's further post-training of the same model.

Or you might get Gemini 5 Arizona.

3.8 Flash + /boost is very capable.

I'm not going to comment on others use of Carbon except to say some article that came out before Argon's external launch saying Googlers hate it was nonsense. Not to say everyone loved it all the time.

I use Carbon heavily and am quite happy with it. For complex designs I may have it and Opus iterate back and forth on the design. They have their own strengths and Opus 5.5 is great, but I use Gemini far more than I do Opus at this point. I know a lot of the jagged edges of Gemini better than Opus though, so take that as you will.

Tried 4 Argon, and it's very much different from 3.1, felt very much the same as any other Frontier, just without the intelligence.

[0] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...

After all they had Nano Banana for years.

But to be honest I am now not sure if Argon was the flash model and this Carbon is pro? It's very confusing.