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mattlondon

Sooo... Is Carbon 4.1? Or is it different to Argon 4 somehow? Different model? Or point update?

Is Argon "pro" and Carbon "ultra"?

Is Argon obsolete now? Does Carbon replace it or live alongside of it?

Very confusing naming!

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1. "Building on Gemini 4 Argon". 2. Same price. 3. Relatively short time between releases.

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

IIUC, that was all the Flash releases from 3.5 to 3.8

Their Flash-lite, Flash, Pro naming convention was fine, at least until they stopped updating the Pro model lol. I guess the marketing department wanted a clean reset so that people would forget that gap, so they copied the other companies.

But they still kept the embarrassing 3.1 pro model in the Gemini app to remind people, so I'm not sure what they achieved.

For Gemini that is a foundation model version 3.1 3.5 4 etc. and there is checkpoint on evolution of those specific models. Gemini 4 had Argon - B<> - Carbon and who knows they might have Dysporsium or Europium.

Or you might get Gemini 5 Arizona.

I’m just even more confused

Yes.. very confusing names. Carbon is the next iteration of Argon.

It's just what some PM thinks sounds cool

Carbon is like Opus

Argon is like Sonnet

Helium will be small and squeaky I presume

I'm surprised no one at Google realized that both OpenAI and Anthropic's naming schemes follow a fairly clear progression and that they should do something similar to reduce confusion. I would have assumed the opposite given that Argon has a higher periodic number

Lots of commenters here are confused by Luna, Terra, and Sol still haha.

That's on them imo. The point is consistency

It isn't obvious that a fable is "better" than an opus either.

Originally the model tier that was better than Opus was called Mythos, which makes sense. Fable makes no sense, since a fable is just a small story with animals. They should have used "Legend" rather than Fable.

So Argon was 4.0 Flash effectively? Interesting that there is such a small gap between their new Pro and Flash tiers

I don't think that's right. Carbon and Argon have the same price.

I suspect they're using a new naming convention because they had previous contractual obligations tied to the "pro" and "flash" naming, and by switching to a new naming schema they avoid those commitments.

Both seem to have the same pricing: $2 in / $10 out initially, rising to $4 in / $20 out after the introductory period. That made me wonder whether Carbon might be Argon with additional RL training. What’s the Opus/Sonnet comparison based on?

Carbon is Fable / Astra level. Argon is their Opus / Sol.

then why are both priced like sonnet?

They didn't pay the Nvidia tax

Carbon is discounted temporarily. It's twice as expensive as Argon. Google TPUs are more efficient than Nvidia hardware plus Google gets them at cost so they have both better margins and more pricing power compared to other frontier labs.

No, it's not. The naming is just bad. It's the next iteration of Argon

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