They waited a whole year—until the "free year for students" promotion ended—to release their flagship model. I can't believe I've been stuck with a crappy model like the 3.1 Pro until now.

hi

I want a level down from this, will we get the next level down with reasonably good competitive specs?

Congrats to Google on this! I wonder when the labs will start requiring commits in spend. It must be gnarly to do capacity planning if users swap between models every few weeks.

Gemini 3 was showing frontier level benchmarks as well, so we'll see how it works out. In any case, competition still works, and many well resourced groups are cooking.

BUT I'd like to call attention to Google's AI-risk freeloading. If they are truly rejoining the frontier race, then I believe they have similar pacing and communications responsibilities as the other players. Google has much higher ... institutional credibility than Anthropic and OpenAI.

They have not lived up to these responsibilities so far. In particular, in context of HuggingFace investigations, training shutdowns, and similar: a technical postmortem of the "you are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please." Gemini outburst is long overdue.

- https://paritybits.me/google-should-provide-a-technical-post...

- https://gemini.google.com/share/6d141b742a13 (last message)

“…rolling out to a set of trusted cyber defenders” == capturing the market for large regulated industries and governments where we already have established relationships.

Some of these have been unable or unwilling to get the attention of OpenAI or Anthropic and we need to make sure we’re the runner up here.

When Antigravity first came out, when I installed it, it made itself the default application to open all programming file types.... .txt. json, csv, you name it. It was absolutely infuriating and took me a month to put everything back to normal. So they've lost a lot of trust with me.

Why is it called "Argon"?

> autonomously identify and apply memory optimizations across Google’s data centers, freeing up over 300 TiB of memory once rolled out, with an estimated 500 TiB to 1 PiB in total savings.

This puts those Cloudflare optimization posts in perspective.

The ~200% improvement over the next nearest competitor on Harvey's Legal Benchmark is astounding. I have to imagine this is sending some shockwaves through lawtech companies right now.

My wish for Christmas is that Google releases the old Gemini models as open weights.

I miss you, Gemini 2.5 Pro :(

For real though. If they've become commercially uninteresting, that would be a pretty cool move.

They might have a good model but they need to sort the application side for devs. E.g letting us use subscriptions in other harnesses and QOL stuff like auto mode.