Gemini 4 Argon

Gemini 4 Argon blog.google

Announcing Gemini 4 Argon, our frontier model for real-world coding, enterprise knowledge work, and cyber defense, rolling out soon.

999 points•bradleyg223•about 6 hours ago•672 comments•

#argon #gemini #x2f #coding #frontier #real #enterprise #knowledge

See also: Gemini 4 Argon (High): Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914236

672 comments

taylorfinleyabout 6 hours ago

Ten days ago I had an experience with Gemini 3.8 flash that made me wonder if I was being routed to a different model under test. I was trying to use rocm with llama.cpp on my 128gb Strix Halo but could only get it to run Vulkan. I pasted the error message into agy and it proceeded to attach GDB to my GPU driver, reverse-engineer the kernel queue ioctl interface, and author an LD_PRELOAD C shim to get ROCm llama.cpp working on my Strix Halo. My jaw was hanging open the whole time.

Edit to add the fix: https://gist.github.com/birep/6f2c8d490c7a29820997d57bd654c3...

spankaleeabout 6 hours ago

3.8 Flash is just quite good, and so is the Antigravity harness.

I use a mix of Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, and Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini holds it's own. Especially in writing, frontend, and sysadmin work. agy for configuring a NixOS system has been truly incredible.

mapontoseventhsabout 6 hours ago

Even if agy was the best (it's not, and is missing basic features) you wouldn't rather have a choice?

I cancelled Ultra because they forced me into their harness like I should adapt to them, rather than the other way around.

starfallgabout 2 hours ago

I found 3.8 Flash in Agy to be generally better than GPT 6, and only behind from Opus 5.5.

moecablesabout 4 hours ago

I use Antigravity but for some reason, `agy` in the command line feels very bad/incapable of doing things. I can't quite explain it but the most common issue I run into it is just hanging on being unable to finish a tool call

plasticchrisabout 1 hour ago

This is why I think llms are a killer app for Linux desktop. They’ve been trained on Linux very hard, and it cleanly solves the “how do I make it do $thing” problem since everything is open and the llm can manipulate it. For example: Sound not working? Just tell the llm.

_heimdallabout 1 hour ago

Is that specific to Linux? For better or worse, I have felt like it'd fairly good at working through most tech stacks I throw at it.

I have a client app on a very old (for the JS world) version of eleventy using NetlifyCMS (also outdated). Claude has quite easily picked that up to add features to it along the way.

IndeanCondorabout 6 hours ago

Can confirm, I was doing a routine internet search thing for a curiosity 3 days ago (about the only thing I used Gemini for) and was surprised by how suddenly thorough and quality the response seemed, almost overnight.

seanthemonabout 5 hours ago

Gemini for day-to-day and top-of-head queries and claude for the real beefy work

amangulianiabout 5 hours ago

Can confirm - I am HEAVY claude user, but always like to check with AGY and CODEX in between. AGY with Gemini 3.8 flash cooked last couple of times and CODEX is basically out of the mix for me

onlyrealcuzzoabout 4 hours ago

Sol 6.1 is quite good, but damn is it slow.

I'm using it to run overnight tasks, and that's it until my quota runs out.

Canceled my subscription.

gottorfabout 5 hours ago

My experience with Gemini 3.8 Flash has been awful; it gives me the most hallucinations out of the major models. I'm not using it for coding, but general research on different topics.

WarmWashabout 2 hours ago

The achilles heel of 3.8 flash is it's january 2025 knowledge cutoff date. Yes, almost 2 years ago.

I'm assuming that Argon has at least a June 2026 date, but man, the 3 series models were a mess with newer information.

MILPabout 5 hours ago

I'm also not using it for coding but I've found Flash 3.8 to generate much better HTML output than Sonnet or Opus.

staticman2about 5 hours ago

The web version of Gemini is awful at search but I don't think that's the models fault.

mattjoyceabout 5 hours ago

Hallucination seems a very dated term.

nickysielickiabout 6 hours ago

The important take away here: the leapfrogging we’ve seen this year doesn’t seem to be a temporary thing. The famous theory of Dario Amodei was that AI was this winner-takes-all field where the first team to get a head start would never cede ground back. The term he liked to use was, “concentrating”. This is yet another datapoint that he was wrong about that. AI seems more distributed amongst neoclouds and traditional hyperscalers, FAANG and startups, GPUs and ASICs than it did this time a year ago.

Nobody has a moat.

LarsDu88about 5 hours ago

Google has TPUs, a frontier model, a completely separate and lucrative revenue stream they can call on at will, and teams working on multiple different language modeling strategies simultaneously. Did I mention the vast and ominous data centers that already serve a significant fraction of the internet? If that ain't a moat, then what exactly is a moat?

landdate44 minutes ago

Google wins.They have been on the frontier of ai for the last what 10-20 years (up until chatgpt)? You have the established company with tons of traininv resources at tgeir disposal from all their services and being the biggest search indexer, and also having the top minds in AI and computing in general.

Gemini wins and I said this since the beginning. Google wins in general. I never understood why they have not been the highest market cap companh for the last 10 years. And I despise google but its obvious.

giancarlostoroabout 3 hours ago

I've been lowkey rooting for them, not a fan of Altman, and I don't know if I trust Anthropic either, I'm not Google's #1 fan, but I think they can definitely innovate heavily in this field, they have a lot of key things as has been mentioned.

throwitaway222about 4 hours ago

Not to mention - they have the internet already indexed (they have a local copy), all books, and youtube. Beyond that, everyone "connects" to Gmail, but google HAS Gmail.

UncleOxidantabout 3 hours ago

Recently there's been a lot of talk about how Google has fallen behind and missed the AI boat. Now today with Gemini 4 they're back in the boat. But give it a few months, people will be counting Google out again. This has been a repeating pattern for at least a couple years now.

motoboiabout 1 hour ago

You forgot YouTube. The source of world model data. THAT is the mother of all moats, if they can survive until capable of taping into it.

xnxabout 5 hours ago

> Nobody has a moat.

Custom hardware, data centers, huge cash reserves, deep/broad talent pool, and non-AI customer base are all huge advantages if not moats.

Google, Microsoft, or Amazon are more likely to be the AI leaders than OpenAI or Anthropic.

dmixabout 4 hours ago

The technical crowd will always overvalue the recent technical advantage of software over the available customer base and business model math.

woahabout 5 hours ago

> Google, Microsoft, or Amazon are more likely to be the AI leaders than OpenAI or Anthropic.

If not now, then when will these companies be AI leaders?

Even Google, with its staggering advantages in cash, compute, real estate, training data, and having basically invented the field only manages to briefly claim a 1-2 week lead once or twice a year.

bluGillabout 5 hours ago

There are many companies that have data centers. They are conceptually easy to build. An ASIC is difficult enough that if you make one someone will leapfrog you while you are still making it (at least so far), though once you have one your costs will be enough lower than the competition that you can perhaps undercut them.

IX-103about 5 hours ago

If Moore's law continues, then in less than 10 years today's state of the art model will be able to run on a cell phone. How much smarter do we actually need AI to be? Would it still require datacenters and custom hardware?

_heimdallabout 1 hour ago

Nobody has a moat, but everyone is f*&$ed. Competitors do seem to leapfrog each other, but each step is getting closer to beating humans at most tasks. Once that happens, that do we do?

echelon37 minutes ago

Nobody is going to make money for anything, perhaps.

Or maybe everyone makes money for everything.

The world could turn into a world of plenty. Or it could become a YouTube popularity contest where the MrBeasts get to eat and nobody else is interesting enough to sell themselves.

This is an absolutely crazy time to be alive and most people still don't see it.

altruiosabout 6 hours ago

> Nobody has a moat except nvidia

For now, for cloud training. but for consumers, nvidia vs amd reasonably close - the moat there is thin and shrinking. I suspect AMD will surprise us. nvidia has no motes in china, which may be a new source of (gpu) chip design. Huawei's Ascend 910C is about a generation behind... again: for now.

point is: moats dry up. I see nvidia's shrinking as a real possibility.

dgemmabout 2 hours ago

I find it hard to imagine nvidia's moat not drying up - the hyperscalers already have more cost effective silicon and the AI labs already use a mixture of all the capacity they can get their hands on.

culiabout 6 hours ago

China will always be generations behind until they crack domestic EUV

pvab3about 5 hours ago

The whole winner-take-all idea seems entirely based around Singularity/Rationalism and would require massive advances that we probably aren't close to at all.

danny_codesabout 3 hours ago

I never understood this race to AGI thing. Why is this desirable for shareholders? If God is created, it seems very unlikely God is going to work for shareholder value.

nater5000about 4 hours ago

Yeah, it kind of seems like we haven't gotten to the "head start" he's referring to yet.

babelfishabout 6 hours ago

> We’ll continue to gather feedback from early testers as we iterate on guardrails before making Argon available to developers, enterprises, and consumers as soon as possible.

Gemini not beating the "can't release a model" allegations

Androiderabout 6 hours ago

My Gemini app (updated today) and https://gemini.google.com/ has _3.6_ as the latest selectable model, as a paying Pro user in the US. How is that even possible? Gemini 3.7 was released in August, 3.8 early September. What is going on over there?

rahimnathwaniabout 4 hours ago

In my consumer gmail account with Pro, I see:

  3.5 Flash-Lite
  3.8 Flash
  3.1 Pro

In both a paid Google Workspace account (without the AI addon) and a free 'GSuite' account, I see:

  3.6 Flash
  3.6 Thinking
  3.1 Pro

vlyanabout 6 hours ago

just Google being whatever the fuck it's been for the past 15 years.

wasabi991011about 4 hours ago

I would imagine you are experiencing a bug. I've been using 3.8 daily since its release (on a Pro plan in Canada). I believe this is true of many people.

What is your reason to believe this is not a bug specific to a small set of Pro users?

XzAeRoshoabout 5 hours ago

I was reading the announcement and wondering the same. And don't forget, still with 3.1 Pro as the frontier model.

asdfasgasdgasdgabout 4 hours ago

That's weird. I got 3.8 and 3.7 on the days they were released. https://imgur.com/a/Xu4wRLM (this is on gemini.google.com, but the same is true of the iOS app and the desktop app).

modelessabout 6 hours ago

When I said I was tired of Google launching waitlists I didn't think they would respond by simply not having a waitlist.

ionwakeabout 6 hours ago

i know this is like "hey guys we got such a cool thing at home ,its rad and uhm we playing with it with our friends"

ok bro thx

Culonavirusabout 5 hours ago

Yeah what's up with that. Also what's with the next big update for Nano Banana? Nano Banana Pro was released almost a year ago!

mrieckabout 5 hours ago

I'm glad.

I already pay $300+ for subs. Please don't tempt me with another $100 sub just because I got curious if the benchmarks were right.

giancarlostoroabout 2 hours ago

You might as well buy an RTX 6000 Pro Workstation GPU....

cmrdporcupineabout 5 hours ago

They will go through the usual transition of "can't release a model" to "won't load in a harness normal people can use for 3-4 weeks" to "it's smart as hell but completely inept at tool use and coding" to "now it's behind everyone else" ... like every Gemini release.

tazjinabout 6 hours ago

> Argon agents are working on migrating C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google

Man, I remember back in the days when the cppnext team was refusing to even consider Rust, instead looking at absurd stuff like Carbon and Swift (!), even though half of the engineering staff already knew where this was headed. I hope they got a few good promos out of the delays at least.

minimaxirabout 6 hours ago

A RewriteInRustBench would be unironically useful at this point since all the main agents can write it reasonably well despite its relative scarcity in the input data.

LarsDu88about 5 hours ago

Rust is the best language for LLMs b/c it gives by far the best debug messages. Just tons of verifiable reward signal for post-training. Even the most rudimentary LLMs can school me on idiomatic Rust

DrBenCarsonabout 3 hours ago

From DARPA’s “Translating all C to Rust” TRACTOR program:

https://www.ll.mit.edu/r-d/projects/translating-all-c-rust-t...

culiabout 6 hours ago

I wouldn't be surprised if we're already at the point of more LLM-written Rust than hand-written. Models training off models

6thbitabout 5 hours ago

Have each agent rewrite openssl in $lang and call it the RollYourOwnCrypto bench.

adamrezichabout 5 hours ago

All the main agents can write Jai code reasonably well despite being even more scarce in input data!

mlmonkeyabout 1 hour ago

> The end result is a memory-safe video decoder that runs 2.7x faster than the Rust port, with identical video output, bringing it closer to the optimized C++.

So ... Rust still can't beat the C++ implementation :-D

Sorry, didn't mean to ignite a langwar, but it's still interesting to see.

baqabout 6 hours ago

Not many people can hold grudges as strong as principal engineers

pshcabout 5 hours ago

Rewrite everything in Rust has been a meme for so long that to see it coming to pass is surreal.

Gigachadabout 2 hours ago

After the current onslaught of 0 days on linux and other C projects combined with the new incredible ability to convert codebases to another language I think we will start to see this actually happen.

I'm not saying we blindly vibe convert Linux to Rust, but I think it could be a valid idea to start converting small parts and carefully auditing them.

timmgabout 6 hours ago

I wonder if this means Carbon is DOA.

I was excited to see what it would be. But I don't think I can argue that it makes as much sense anymore.

qalmakkaabout 6 hours ago

Carbon was clearly DOA the moment it was announced, IMHO. It looked cool but it served none but Google, and now with LLMs you have a massive incentive not to use a niche or new language due to how better LLMs get the bigger the corpus is

The only somewhat realistic proposal in this space is Herb Sutter's cpp2, which is arguably a massive improvement and I'm puzzled why nobody in the standard thought to give it a spin, there's just to much cruft they'll never be able to get rid of unless they make an alternate yet backward compatible syntax with C++ that changes the defaults from "random 80s nonsense" to something better

pornelabout 2 hours ago

Carbon's own docs say:

> Existing modern languages already provide an excellent developer experience: Go, Swift, Kotlin, Rust, and many more. Developers that can use one of these existing languages should.

So the reason for Carbon to exist is gone. C++ code can be migrated straight to Rust without Carbon's stopgap.

YuechenLiabout 6 hours ago

Version 0.0.0.0 after 4 years. Their goal of "full interop with C++ while being a completely new language without any of the flaws of C++" is plain absurd.

It's DOA because Google doesn't have any idea of what Carbon should be, and to be completely honest, at least 80% of what they currently use C++ for should be rewritten Go, you know, that language developed specifically because of the issues with C++ by teams within Google.

uvdn7about 6 hours ago

> Large Scale Codebase Migrations and Optimizations: Argon agents are working on migrating C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google—scaling from tens of thousands of lines in core libraries like re2, libgav1 up to 800K+ lines for the Fuchsia OS Zircon kernel.

To me this is way more significant than other random c++-to-rust-AI-rewrite. If they can pull it off on core C++ libraries en masse, I don't know if C++ will still be relevant in a few years.

I look forward to a post from google on this effort.

mattlondonabout 5 hours ago

> I don't know if C++ will still be relevant in a few years.

And people are worried about human extinction when this is the potential trade-off!

C++'s death cannot come soon-enough.

Seriously though, things have changed so incredibly rapidly in the past year or so. I have never been such an efficient or such a proficient engineer than I have this past year (delivering feature after feature, project after project, faster and better than I could before with better feedback from users etc) and I don't even see the code any more. It could be c++, it could be python, or java or what ever - I don't really care any more: the computer deals with that trivia while I concentrate on what to build and how it should work.

Its amazing. It really is.

onlyrealcuzzoabout 4 hours ago

If Fuschia ever gets finished, that's a pretty good benchmark we've reached AGI.

randomperson321about 4 hours ago

I don't think it's worth trading off a risk of human extinction against the ability to convert C++ code to Rust more efficiently.

mhilsabout 5 hours ago

There is a blog post on (the early baby steps of) that: https://bughunters.google.com/blog/scaling-memory-safety. We have multiple AI-assisted Rust rewrites running in production now.

(Full disclosure: I am one of the coauthors)

SwellJoeabout 5 hours ago

"I don't know if C++ will still be relevant in a few years."

The standards body members are still fighting about whether memory safety is important enough to change the language for, so, I would guess the answer is "no".

Zagittaabout 5 hours ago

Yeah that was abundantly clear when Bjarne Stroustrup published "A call to action: Think seriously about “safety”; then do something sensible about it"[0] as a reaction to NSA's recommendation to no longer use C/C++.

[0] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p27...

izacusabout 4 hours ago

C++ will outlive you.

npalliabout 5 hours ago

If no one is reading or writing Rust code at that point, it all being agent driven, Rust itself is going to be a very short step before it gets disinter-mediated away and it's English -> complex heterogenous machine code across GPU/TPU/CPU/xPUs. Not sure Rust fans or C++ haters have thought this through.

gavin_geeabout 1 hour ago

This. The next gen is LLM direct to machine code. Watch MSFT in this space with their dev tool industry -this will be the master stroke

tonyhart7about 5 hours ago

Yeah, if they can make it work at google scale then no one would absolutely question it anymore

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