If Argon was impressive, I would maybe believe it. Right now, argon is not even close to Opus 5.5 or even 6.1 Sol. It can’t even infer intent as well as Gemini 3.1 Pro. Google has yet to release a frontier class model imo
Astra (or broadly openAI) are best for mathematics, 3D modeling, and vision. Opus 5.5 is best at like visual design (or just in general adding more taste and feel)
Now, it can depend on your definition of frontier class model. But Argon is a strong model. Google is not running a distant third. If OpenAI and Anthropic shut down they would have the strongest model on the market in like 2 months imo. Google does suck at shipping (maybe due to an unusual amount of dogfooding models internally?)
And we know all the labs have stronger internal models than their public releases.