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Comment by 827a | Hacker News Reader

At this point if a Google PM handed me $100 and said "go figure out how to issue a prompt to Gemini 4 Argon" I'm only ~30% sure I could figure out how. The Gemini app in my phone only has 3.8 Pro as the latest model; it does say "Ultra" in the bottom left, but I really don't think I'm on the Ultra plan. How I would sign up for that, on a Workspace account, is beyond our brightest minds.

Its sad watching them try to keep up when they want nothing more than to crumble under the weight of their own bureaucracy, and at this point I'm not sure there's any hope for them.

View on HN

This model is not for you or me. This model is for Google AI engineers to put on their perf review at the end of the year. How you find or not find it, it doesn't matter. It goes into the "designed and developed Gemini 4 Carbon Ultra Pro" paragraph and people get a promotion, get to keep their jobs and hope to not get replaced by Gemini 4 Carbon next year.

That seems like an overly negative caricature of Google’s corporate culture, and unlikely to be the case here, given the stakes and enormous investments in AI.

It’s more likely what the grandparent was saying, I’m reminded of Steve Yegge’s rant from 15 years ago and it seems like not a lot has changed.

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

Bill Gates' Movie Maker flame (self-described!) would seem a more appropriate analogy.

https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...

Except I'm not sure Google has a Gates.

Nobody from the Google C-suite seems like they're ever trying to install their most important products, as a customer.

What gets me about that email chain is that Gates complains, but doesn't provide any guidance, instead leaving it up to the people who make the mess to try and fix the mess.

Compare to leadership likes Jobs, where he would spell out how it needs to function.

BLUF

>> I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.

The results are indistinguishable. Massive organisations tend towards self aggrandivizing work.

At some point, the metrics for delivering to customers runs counter to what the bureaucracy was building itself to actually deliver: jobs.

Yeah - I'm not too sure what the discrepancy is either. "crumble under the weight of their own bureaucracy" and "How you find or not find it, it doesn't matter [because the bureaucracy incentivizes self-promotion and not user impact]" seem to be more in agreement with each other than disagreement.

"The purpose of a system is what it does"

  - Some Guy

Quote is from Stafford Beer, actually.

Interesting guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer

"overly"? surely not... maybe in the sense that it isn't "underly", but there are much more uncharitable caricatures of Google's corporate culture that I would freely admit than that.

I think it was more of this one applicable? https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

They don't give a shit. You can use Argon on Pro but not that pro and no not on that app which we depreciated but on this new app which will be depreciate before you can install it.

It honestly is really hard to figure out what to use and where. It shouldn't be. A pro plan is a pro plan. It doesn't matter if you get it via x,y or z. If there is difference based on where you get it, then call it something else and not a pro plan.

They make something are feel like its the best thing in the world and leave users behind to experience it hiding it behind obscure docs and hiddens T&C with no support. And users have no clue what and how to do it.

I wish this was a joke. Turns out, Google turned into a joke. I was really rooting for them; They had everything in place to be the top dog. From people to research to hardware to internet.zip (and video.zip and emails.zip and newsgroups.zip and code.zip and android.zip etc..). I don't want to sound negative and what they built is probably great in its own right, but what was expected of them and what they have delivered so far, I can definitely say that they blew it hard. They did manage to turn gemini into search 2.0 on google.com and it does work.. but, come on. Where's the google of yesterday? Seems they put a ton of weight that's not on the level of people that were there before and I don't want to offend anyone there, but it sure looks like that.

The same was true 15 years ago when the cloud started hyping up and Google missed that in similar ways as well, so I’m not sure whether the “Google of yesterday” is who you think it is.

This is the Google of yesterday, they didn’t change.

Fair point

A good % of the Google of yesterday is now in working in frontier labs, crushing it.

The only good products Google has ever built in-house are search and GMail. Everything else is acquisition or crappy product.

So we should ask “why would it be different this time.”

IMO google maps and google earth were revolutionary when they came out. And maps stayed well ahead of competition for many many years.

I'm one of those few that liked Google Wave!

There are ones of you!

Maps was originally an acquisition.

Both were acquisitions.

It started at where2 and Google acquired them.

Youtube, hate it or not, is really good. The amount of data they have to handle everyday is on different level.

For sure. It was an acquisition, though.

Apart from search, what did Google make in house?

Gmail? I don’t recall that being an acqui.

Google finance was an incredible portfolio tracking and research tool. Until they released v2 which took away all the functionality and replaced it with a news feed.

And think that somebody designed it, and somebody else approved it.

Chrome was pretty great as well, it was desperately needed.

Google Chrome didn't start from scratch. Blink came from WebKit which came from KDE's KHTML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

Entirely irrelevant - Chrome really stepped up both security and speed over WebKit at that time.

The comment you replied to was: "The only good products Google has ever built in-house are [...]"

I don't have enough information to judge how much of Chrome was original work and how much was pre-existing work. Though I guess by now, after nearly 20 years, Chrome's codebase looks absolutely nothing like KHTML.

It was the rare confluence of people needing the same thing the megacorp showing them ads needed. We all benefited, no hard feelings, but always remember to look at where the puck is going.

I blame how things turned out more on Mozilla being distracted and forgetting about their own user base, to be honest.

The fact that it made the browser itself impossible to monetize to fund development was a part of it. They were an antitrust insurance to Google and tried lots of stuff to improve its position. Granted they failed, sometimes quite spectacularly, but I still drive Firefox for personal use.

The money earned with Firefox should have gone to Firefox but went to vanity projects instead. Firefox OS, Mozilla Social, Firefox Send / Persona, acquiring Pocket, etc etc. And all of it failed.

Nevermind the controversies of silly ad campaigns and CEO salaries and whatnot.

Mozilla should have just reinvested all the money into Firefox. Heck, they couldn’t even finish their rust-based rendering engine.

App Engine was good for its time, and I don't think that was an acquisition. Similarly, Cloud Storage and Google Cloud in general are pretty good products.

I started using AWS when EC2 and S3 first came out, but was forced to switch to Gcloud by the most recent company I joined. I was pleasantly surprised. In many ways it's more techie-focused than AWS, which is more enterprise-focused. And their managed Kubernetes is second to none.

Isn't Waymo the state of the art?

They’re still the same price as an uber and there’s no way to actually order one, it’s all random. I don’t understand why… like I actively would prefer them. If they were available so instead I find myself reaching for the cybercabs instead at half the price.

Uh, use the Waymo app?

HN is hilarious man lol half the world runs on the office suite and drive, at all levels

Workspace was acquisition.

Google acquired it from Upstartle (the company behind the online word processor Writely).

Writely was created in 2005 by Claudia Carpenter, Steve Newman, and Sam Schillace. Google bought Upstartle in 2006 and Writely became the foundation of Google Docs. Google then combined it with other acquisitions, such as 2Web Technologies for spreadsheets, and launched Google Docs & Spreadsheets in October 2006.

Calendar is my fav.

> I was really rooting for them

may I ask why?

I can't answer for another person but 30 to 25 years ago it was kind of Google vs Microsoft. The Don't be evil times.

overly negative comment

maybe spend a bit more time on the numbers presented in the announcement, which are pretty great

Uh, proof needed for this outlandish claim.

You want an executive to issue a press release about how dysfunctional and bureaucratic their company is and that’s why it’s so hard for users to actually use these new models?

I think I see the pattern - you like just making up things that you believe that others are thinking and asserting that those are their beliefs.

Uh, proof needed for this outlandish claim

> Uh, proof needed for this outlandish claim

Your sarcasm is as low-effort as your original post.

Anyone with a functioning brain can see how

> You want an executive to issue a press release about how dysfunctional and bureaucratic their company is and that’s why it’s so hard for users to actually use these new models?

...is intentionally assigning beliefs to me purely from your own imagination without any connection to reality.

Your childish pretending that you didn't say something that is literally on record immediately above is a tactic employed by kindergartners, caught by their parents eating a cookie, who claim that they're not eating a cookie.

> Your sarcasm is as low-effort as your original post.

Putting too much effort into sarcasm doesn't work well usually; it works because it's low effort.

> is intentionally assigning beliefs to me ...Anyone with a functioning brain can see ...caught by their parents eating a cookie, who claim that they're not eating a cookie...

Who is assigning what beliefs to you? What cookies? Not sure what you're after here but sounds like you're a bit upset.

> Putting too much effort into sarcasm doesn't work well usually; it works because it's low effort.

Your comment is exceptionally low effort by the standards of sarcasm. llama-3-8b-level, in that it's trivial, uninteresting, unamusing, uninformative, not clever, and incorrect.

> Who is assigning what beliefs to you?

You did, in the comment that I quoted from you immediately before my statement.

> Not sure what you're after here but sounds like you're a bit upset.

We've established that you have either a severe lack of reading comprehension or are maliciously lying, given that someone with rather below average intelligence would be able to tell that your comment assigns a belief to me that I never held, by reading the two sentences immediately adjacent to each other.

Most HN readers are capable of this reading comprehension, so anyone reading this thread will be able to tell that you're wrong, and I can link to this in the future if you make similarly deceptive comments.

> Your comment is exceptionally low effort by the standards of sarcasm. llama-3-8b-level, in that it's trivial, uninteresting, unamusing, uninformative, not clever, and incorrect.

Ok. Well, I found it amusing and interesting.

> You did, in the comment that I quoted from you immediately before my statement.

You still haven't quoted them. Just vague references and a lot of angry words.

> We've established that you have either a severe lack of reading comprehension or are maliciously lying, given that someone with rather below average intelligence would be able to tell that your comment assigns a belief to me that I never held, by reading the two sentences immediately adjacent to each other.

You still haven't quoted anything are just continuing with more insults.

> Most HN readers are capable of this reading comprehension, so anyone reading this thread will be able to tell that you're wrong,

Yes they are and it would look rather embarrassing for some of us... but I can't stop you ;-)

> You still haven't quoted them

Factually incorrect.

You wrote:

> You want an executive to issue a press release about how dysfunctional and bureaucratic their company is and that’s why it’s so hard for users to actually use these new models?

In this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50284948

Which I quoted in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50288198

There we go. That's the quotation. Your claim that I never quoted is objectively, factually, trivially false.

This is wild. You literally not only forgot your own words that you wrote less than 12 hours ago, but you were incapable of reading the comment where I very clearly cited them right back to you.

This is sub-grade-school levels of memory and reading comprehension. That's not even an exaggeration - grade schoolers are easily capable of doing the ctrl-f levels of "find this exact string of text in this other string of text" that you just failed.

>> You want an executive to issue a press release about how dysfunctional and bureaucratic their company is and that’s why it’s so hard for users to actually use these new models?

> is intentionally assigning beliefs to me purely from your own imagination without any connection to reality.

No, that part is asking a question. I assumed you misquoted that part and meant something else. Nobody is assigning you beliefs. The normal response to someone asking a question is saying something like "yes, that is exactly the proof I would expect" or "no, I would like an insider to come forward and give an account of X,Y,Z". You did neither and instead started with insults

> This is sub-grade-school levels of memory and reading comprehension.

Huh... you don't say

> No, that part is asking a question.

Now we know you're operating in bad faith.

There was nothing about my comment that remotely motivated a question like the one you asked - but you were, quite knowingly, implying that I believed that. This is known as a loaded question, and it's unambiguously malicious.

When I link this comment in other threads in the future, you'll be able to see that others can see it for what it is. Even on HN, only a vanishingly small fraction of individuals can't recognize a loaded question when they see one.

Edit: And, because you're acting in bad faith and will likely claim that there's no loaded question, I asked Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok whether there was a loaded question in our exchange, and every single one of them said said that you embedded a loaded question (with ChatGPT also correctly identifying the implied accusation bundled in). Full prompt below - future HN readers, feel free to reproduce yourself :)

-------

is there a loaded question in this exchange?

A: This model is not for you or me. This model is for Google AI engineers to put on their perf review at the end of the year. How you find or not find it, it doesn't matter. It goes into the "designed and developed Gemini 4 Carbon Ultra Pro" paragraph and people get a promotion, get to keep their jobs and hope to not get replaced by Gemini 4 Carbon next year.

B: Uh, proof needed for this outlandish claim.

A: You want an executive to issue a press release about how dysfunctional and bureaucratic their company is and that’s why it’s so hard for users to actually use these new models?

As outlandish as publishing 4.0 Argon, making people sub to Google AI pro/ultra, only to discover that Argon was not included into Antigravity

It was included in Ultra from the start and in Pro one-two days later?

Thanks for the fact-check. It's kind of wild the misinformation that people try to get away with online.

I remember a year ago and a bit ago trying to get an api key for some Gemini ~3 model. I probably spent an hour trying to find how to get a key in AI Studio. Finally figure it out and got a key.

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.

Yeah, their native API reliability is absolutely horrible. Constant request failures. I've always had to go through Vertex or OpenRouter for any sort of heavy load.

Try getting a api key to read your own gmail (not LDAP).

It is insanely difficult vs any other new sass startup with a profile->api key.

I won't even bother typing out all the steps.

This 100% being in the compute/ai console (i dont even know what is what) is easier to "google it" and hopefully land on the correct page. Same with AI billing. Can never find the damn page !

Oh and good luck figuring out model-api-names (same complaint higher up)

Model selector at the top drops down and shows

* 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.

Microsoft has figured this out: 1. No models at all. 2. Everything is copilot.

“What?” You ask?

Yes.

Technically not true any more (for some versions of copilot chat, at least) -- my workplace's version has a "GPT 5.6 Sol" selector with "Answer faster" or "Think Deeper". ("Think deeper" appears to represent the lowest reasoning effort).

But you have to select it each time; otherwise "Auto" sends you to a lobomised model that is probably Phi-4 :(

One of the unexpectedly useful aspects of Simon Willison's pelican benchmark is that you can estimate what model you're using via the pelican it generates:

"GPT 5.6 Sol": appears genuine, albeit low reasoning. -> handed off agentically: appears to be using Luna for agentic tasks.

"Auto": very low quality, does not appear to be an OAI model.

Yes, but last time I asked copilot to provide an alt text for an image depicting a experimental procedure using rodents, it suggested "A rat being attacked by another group of rats".

MSFT is releasing models. See the MAI suite: https://microsoft.ai/models/

I've tried using MAI something Flash and it is very low context. Like barely for writing utility functions.

That’s why no one uses it and it sucks.

It is part of Office 365 ( or whatever they are calling it now ) subscription and apart from coding, it is literally forced into everyone's throat in Fortune 500 for day to day task.

It's supposed to be from 'smallest' to 'biggest' not release date.

The problem is when they stop releasing big models for so long that their small models overtake large ones.

User wise, the average person will see pro and expect it to be better. Where as companies like OpenAI have tended to release across small/mid/large such that the disparity hasn’t been large in terms of a smaller model outperforming their latest mid/large model.

Not sure how much it matters for the average user though.

For myself and most others that actively use LLMs, I’m aware of the model names and differences, and on the off chance I don’t, I can do a quick search to find out.

On the other hand, my dad (“average user”) probably doesn’t care whether to use Argon or Pro, or Flash for that matter. They are all good enough for his use case anyway.

I suppose the “Auto” option is what AI companies expect the average user to use.

Not sure I agree with this argument, it's basically saying that it doesn't matter if stuff is badly labelled as people don't care what they're using anyway. fanta can be labelled as coke and coke can be labelled as fanta because the person consuming it doesn't care if they're consuming fanta or coke.

I think in many cases people may not be very AI pilled / be looking at artificial analysis etc and might think "I'm doing this much harder task, let me use the best model" and they may infer from naming that 3.1 Pro is better than the recent flash models which would be incorrect.

Anthropic had an issue with delaying the release of a new Haiku for ages but it didn't really mess with things as it was always the weakest model and so positionally it stayed the same. If however they stopped releasing new Opus models and somehow Haiku started overtaking Opus I think it'd confuse the normie consumer.

Pro is better, except for agentic coding work

Agentic coding work or just agentic work?

You would hope they wouldn't have old big models that are worse than new small models available in the interface like that.

This is the least bad thing about using antigravity. It’s friction and jank all the way down.

I was confused a bit where this was. Then I had to Google Gemini, which lead me to gemini.google.com (did not know it existed, and I use gemini in prod via google cloud).

First thing there that got me was that all of my Google searches. Why? I googled "snoop dog real name". Why is this considered a gemini chat now? If I actually used it, my chats would be buried under dumb quick google searches I did. And it seems its only my phone searches, not alL?

I assume because some PM will say "we have 1243153344% more Gemini searches than last quarter", then gonna get paid 3 million USD bonus for something that ruined the UX.

Then, I looked at the top and didnt find the model dropdown. It is next to the input, okay. I click it. Argon? Locked. Even tho I pay for the API anyways and can use it via the API.

But lets continue.

My app stopped working 2 days ago for no reason - apparently, I needed to move to a "prepaid payment mode", which wasn't a problem for the last 2 years.

- I open the AI studio, the banner to update shows, then page reloads and it disappeared.

- I was like okay, lets see - checked billing, tried to top up. First time my bank's 2FA notification didnt come, so I rejected and tried to top up. Then it would reuse the same windows as before with rejections. Okay, I refresh, topup, it works. I try to open usage to see my usage, but I can't see the spend there in any currency besides tokens.

- Now let me try it out. I type in the prompt, select the model, hit enter. Oh wait, I have to link the API key. I click the button, a dialog opens, then closes itself without any information. The prompt? There is no prompt anymore, you have to type it out yourself.

While I believe in Google's AI offering - I use their models and for my niche they are the best for good quality at great speeds.

But holy shit, every time I use one of their products, I just get annoyed. While Logan and AI studio team have really done some big improvements, the overall Google offering is confusing as hell.

Why does a customer have to hear "Oh yeah, don't use Google Cloud now, use Vertex via Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform"? Because some PM chased a bonus?

The internal politics are definitely ruining any edge they might have.

> First thing there that got me was that all of my Google searches. Why? I googled "snoop dog real name". Why is this considered a gemini chat now?

It isn't - it's probably an _assistant_ query? In fact the Gemini and Search orgs are cartoonishly at loggerheads; both developing more or less the same product (http://gemini.google.com vs http://google.ai).

No, it is a search from my launcher on S24. Literally google searched from the launcher as I always do. I specifically remembered that, because I was sitting on the couch with my GF watching a movie and quickly googled his real name.

Now that I look at it, weirdly, both show different results.

Gemini shows only what I searched on my phone, meanwhile Google.ai shows ALL of my searches as chats.

Guess both PM's are getting a big bonus this year, and the stock price will get a nice bump from "Look at how much people use our AI".

Weird, maybe it's specific to your launcher? My searches from the -1 page of the launcher don't appear in Gemini, and the ones from the bottom corner swipe to search or OK Google don't appear in AI mode.

Didn't for me (antigravity, pro sub). I got it working with the API, but to my dismay I learned that counts as enterprise and so many features are disabled, such as auto mode.

Claude and OpenAI were doing it. What good are business lemmings if they don't yeet themselves off a cliff?

> how is the oldest model, the Pro model?

Because apparently their Pro models had issues.

Wouldn't you rather a company be honest about that than hiding it from you?

The other end of the scale is Microsoft, where everything is Copilot.

Also limits are horrendous on all plans I might as well instead use Fable that would cost me less

I only use Pro for Google as their models were so far behind, but I tried to give Argon a go, and notably it is only available in the chat interface. One brief conversation, with three exchanges, and my quota was exhausted and it restricted me to Flash-lite for the rest of the day. Rather comical stuff.

And it prompts me to upgrade to Ultra for "5x more usage". In contrast I use my Claude Max plan endlessly, on enormous problems, and my 5x max plan sees me almost never hitting double digits on my quota using Opus 5.5. It doesn't compel me to sign up for Google's higher level plans.

i hear this but i can't believe it. I'm writing multiple moderate apps. rebuilding entire distributions. not coming anywhere near hitting the limit. Pro plan (on a discount too). What am I doing wrong (right?)?

Im using pro on a discount. I got argon a few days after the release but the usage limits are worthless. Asking it for a simple review of a blog post blows through 50% of the usage limit. And in the limited experimenting I have been able to do because of that it also isn’t smarter than 3.8 flash.

Could it be skills / customizations? There are tools that will help you understand where your tokens are getting burned.

Making sure you are scoping your context, being specific also helps.

And I do 90% of my work on 3.8 - flash - low. C, go , JS, bash , powershell generated content. Near perfect quality.

I hear lots of people say the budgets are low – I’m absolutely hammering it sometimes indiscriminately (shell into this instance, rebuild the entire vm image).

so I’m not sure what the gap is.

I’m using the default anti gravity setup. 3.8 medium is my daily driver. This gets me pretty far. (Definitely not as far as Luna and Sol). When I ask the same question to Argon it is 50% of my weekly usage limit gone. So either the usage limit is really a lot smaller or somehow argon thinks a whole lot more even for simple tasks.

i’ll have to test that out. I’ve used argon a bit, but i guess not enough to really push the quota. The actual token based pricing is only 2x

What tasks have you needed it for? So far I’ve only switched for experimentation and while it was better, it didn’t seem necessary, especially given the latency.

I purely intended to use it for review and architectural design given my bad experiences with Gemini coding. The bad experience stemmed from it getting stuck in loops and burning quota. The code quality when it worked was great.

I now asked Argon for a pretty elaborate review and it used only 2% so I will be giving it another shot.

Another thing that can be of influence is that for subscriptions, Google uses some proprietary idea of “work done” for the quota instead of simply how many tokens were burned. I can imagine that this heuristic is sometimes quite off.

Yeah, I have 85 minutes of "High" thinking time on my current hardware project and still have 25% quota left. $20 pro plan.

Using Argon? Are you certain you aren't using the Flash models?

Their Argon limits are the real issue, Flash is ok, but honestly compared to Clause's limits they are all horrid, OpenAI is the next best option if you want Astra, otherwise suck it up and send money to DeepSeek or find a provider for it for cheap.

How are you coding on the Pro plan without antigravity? Copy/paste?

I'm on a Pro plan and Argon is in Antigravity for me now for some reason. It wasn't available at launch so I'm not sure when they backtracked.

I'm on the Pro as well, haven't checked if argon became available on antigravity, will tomorrow, thanks!

I noticed the usage on chat is absymal, but it could very well be that their own harness does a good job in caching and you can squeeze good usage out of it due to this.

I see 4 / Argon on Antigravity

There's no 3.8 Pro. However, there's a 3.8 Flash that's only available with Pro or Ultra subscription.

Brilliant!!

My mistake; it reads "3.6 Flash" and "3.8 Thinking"; I assumed "Thinking" meant "Pro" but maybe it doesn't.

It's at least not worse than Microsoft. Go and start a chat with Copilot. Which one? I don't know, they are all the same. Or maybe they are all different? All I know that if you start a chat in one interface, there is close to a 0% chance (but not quite) that you will find the same chat in another interface.

I had Claude write me a script to probe all the GCP Vertex models. I can say with confidence that I know how to call Argon, because Claude told me how, I did it, saw it was modestly better than Flash for my use case and I decided it wasn't worth the money right now, for this use case.

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

>I had Claude write me a script to probe all the GCP Vertex models. I can say with confidence that I know how to call Argon, because Claude told me how,

Wow that's embarrassing ! Is there no "product owners" or people "fighting for the users" anymore at Google ?

I just spent 10m trying to use this.

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

> I just spent 10m trying to use this

wow pricing has gone way up

Is it dollars per million tokens, or tokens per million dollars?

If you value your time on planet Earth greater than zero dollars, it might as well be the latter.

Maybe ChatGPT could figure it out?

Unironically it's easier through third parties. Cursor has had Argon available, but in our enterprise we cannot get argon from the gemini subscription because they have some weird license split going on.

Yeah I was using Argon in Cursor on launch day and it's become my daily driver for anything requiring moderate smarts or lots of prose.

Not surprising that Cursor is better at charging money for something that isn't an ad.

I don't even read Google's release notes anymore. What's the point? The models are never available.

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.

All I see is 3.1 pro and 3.6 flash, I just canceled the sub lol - those seem like half a year old and I'm too lazy to check - my workplace gives me access to all models in a harness anyways

It literally says Argon right where you select all models (3.5 Flash Lite, 3.8 Flash, 3.1 Pro, 4 Argon).

This isn't rocket science. You're just bitching because your account doesn't have the latest model rolled out yet

I too could not figure it out. Also a shame the Vertex API format is sorta different to OpenAI's, which everyone but Anthropic uses. The sanest way to use Google AI models is via OpenRouter tbh.

Google's UI is always bafflingly overcomplicated and opaque. I never understand why such a large bunch of very intelligent people cannot create a useful UI

Yea they should just sub-contract their WHOLE UI to Hetzner (compute/ai console). ITs a dream to use Hetzner cloud UI !

I thought Gemini 4 Argon is still not publicly released.

It's in Antigravity plans and on Openrouter.

Oh, true, I forgot.

That's what happens when you announce the model 1 month before it is available...

it is for personal accounts, but for corporate accounts your IT needs to enable it

Tried to add AI Ultra or Pro to my business workspace account and I wasn't able to do that a few months back, then tried again when Gemini 3.8 news came out, failed again, then finally upgraded my personal account to AI Pro, tried gemini 3.8 flash on my projects, it was worst model ever. The only benifit I got by having AI Pro is that you can use Youtube adsfree.

At least in my app I have Argon, but that said you can pretty easily prompt it if you have gcp subscription or through openrouter.

Gemini on my phone has a "4 Argon' option. I have the plan through Google One.

Not disagreeing with the premise - I've fought with this in the past - but I'm using Antigravity CLI and Antigravity desktop (GUI), and both automatically started defaulting to Argon 4 as their model a while back.

I have an AI Pro account - which I decided was a no-brainer because of the 5TB of Gmail / GDrive / GPhotos space it gives - and this all just comes along with that.

One thing to check, though, is that the client is running the latest version. At one point my Antigravity GUI, which had been working fine, started listing only Claude and GPT-OSS models. It turned out to be because the GUI needed to be updated. I guess the Google API endpoint had changed behavior without any backward compatibility.

So yeah, they're hilariously bad at rollouts, but it's not that difficult if you're technically inclined or ask an LLM.

I’m with you on this. I tried to get Argon access for our org and failed. gave up. moved on. Still just 3.8 in the dropdown for us.. Thinking its just in so Ai studio app or something and not in gemini app?

Why is it so hard for a decent PM, Designer, and Eng team to build out a better version of Antigravtity with an equivalent web interface for general chat? I don't get it.

Same here. When I use the Gemini app for iOS, it says that I’m on “Ultra” in the left sidebar near the bottom. It doesn’t say that when I’m using Gemini on the web.

Your workspace admin need to get AI Expanded Access plan.

I think it's intentional for balancing a demand profile rather than spiking their massive user base onto a new model all at once

I tend to wait until it shows up in Google AI Studio. That is there web interface at least, no idea for mobile.

the charitable explanation is that they derive the most important revenue in this area from enterprise. And enterprises are not allergic to horrible product experiences and upsells.

The more likely explanation (even if the above is technically true) is that Google is not good at cohesive product experiences.

Guys, please don't interrupt them in this endeavour.

The Android app (and OS while we're at it) is such a horrible mess compared to Claude, just pure horror coming from Google, i'd be ashamed...

If you'd like to see how it compares against other SOTA models-

https://youtu.be/NO2I3ueVQrk?is=OWezDVBL3l2EHMbR

Tldr; it's about as good as sol. Opus 5.5 is still generally the best though carbon can be very good.

> Its sad watching them try to keep up

"try to keep up" ?

Benchmarks are just benchmarks and they could have been carefully selected but it's not "trying to keep up": they're ahead of Fable 5.1 and GTP 6 Astra in 15 of the 17 benchmarks. And in many cases by a huge margin.

Instead of talking about that, let's talk about how difficult it is to pick the model or how crazy Google's product naming methodology is.

Not saying they're not concerns: but let's not downplay what the model is achieving by saying they're "trying to pick up" because switching model ain't as easy as with the competition.

I mean: I don't use a model based on how easy it is to switch to another model. That's not what I'm looking for.

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