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Comment by drob518 | Hacker News Reader

My first reaction after reading the announcement post is that the coding scores look like a weak point.

Google is clearly not targeting coding. They don't have to. They're Google.

Coding is probably one of the worst value propositions, in terms of consuming more tokens per subscription dollar. Doing well in coding might even hurt Google's revenues: it would cannibalize some proportion of Anthropic's user base, which Anthropic serves by... renting Google's infra.

Gemini Flash 3.8 was heavily optimized for agentic coding. It is not an ignored use case. Flash 3.8 benches extremely well on agentic coding. It was very intentionally made good at coding. So was Argon. It is doing a lot of mission critical porting work for things like Rust. Does Google also build models for things other than coding? Yes. It has a lot of enterprise customers that need good general models too. IDK, I haven't seen anything convincing in Flash 3.8 or Argon that say "Google is ignoring coding" it just took a while to get there since Pro 3.1.

(Disclaimer: I work at teh Goog and spend... a lot of time with these models :)

Quota allocations are a massive decision that go all the way up to Sundar: what GDM organizationally wants (training) vs what GCP wants (Anthropic to throw it money hand over fist) are not aligned and a balance has to be made. For various reasons, GCP carved out a significant share; an eleven figure check over a quarter or two carries a real weight. This doesn't mean that GDM was starved for compute or that it wasn't making significant progress, but it absolutely could have had a more impressive H1 if given more resources.

Am I misreading the Argon numbers then? It leads on DeepSWE and Vibe Code Bench but lags on FrontierSWE and Terminal Bench. Should we be viewing Argon as a frontier coding model?

Well done - youre the first poster Ive seen on here who delivered a short-sharp-nuanced analysis on this topic! Well done! (not sarcastic btw)

Wouldn't it be more profitable to have the user pay you for your model, running in your servers, than for a while separate company to try and make a profit out of being the middle-man?

I mean you'd have to crunch the numbers, but Anthropic would need one helluva advantage in efficiency before that would be cheaper to google than the full stack in house

There were rumors that the reason Gemini was delayed was because it was too bad at coding.

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