Man this is so cringe.

> Someone needs to step in before this gets wildly out of control. This sounds like a paid bot, lmao.

I wonder how much is actual improvements in the model and how much comes from better harnesses. I'd be willing to bet that the combination of better harnesses + the models being trained around agentic workflows (i.e the harnesses) has made it significantly better in many things, but it's hard to find other improvements imo.

Year-over-year, yes I would agree with you, but that is not the cycle time of models. And while I share the same hunch as GP, I'm waiting another cycle before putting more confidence behind it.

i burn through a $200 claude and $200 codex plan every week. opus 5.5 is not "step change" it's just a bit better, and the benchmarks show this. Honestly with my workflow I cannot really tell the difference between the top models, they're all pretty much the same in capability, just a bit different. You can build software with all of them, and with all of them you have to validate the change thoroughly to not ship stupid bugs

I do not see the current training regime of "relentlessly try anything to get the task done" as a true step change in intelligence. This is one of the reasons I suspect capability acquisition is slowing.

A more intelligent model would not default to spaghetti throwing, it would pause to consider the problem fundamentals, the accuracy of assumptions, and ask questions that remove ambiguity. This however does not lend itself to increasing token sales while prices remain inflated from market and brand dominance.

Premium Lite is thrown in as well. I have AI Pro free for 18 months and I have checked the T&C docs.

Google One - Pro tier. I have it via Lenny's Product Pass which, imo, is a much better deal since it includes Cursor Pro, Granola, and like dozens of other paid sub tiers: https://www.lennysproductpass.com/

I use the hell out of both. Kind of sad that they took Spark out of beta-access, being able to orchestrate via your phone on something that has direct access to your Drive meant I was authoring skills and other functionality on a schedule with spreadsheets serving as databases, deterministic tests, etc.

Hope they roll it out to a full feature soon

Google AI pro in the USA, if you have Verizon wireless it’s $10 a month add on. Without Verizon it’s $20 a month I believe. You can also share most of the benefits with up to 5? People.

Afaict, they are targeting difference user bases, Google being after their existing user base, having lost in the developer ecosystem to the two labs and open weight models.

FWIW, it's available via API to everyone. (I just tested it out via OpenRouter).

Whether it's actually better than OAI/Anthropic offerings, probably not, but if Google has managed to get back to parity, that's good for competition, prices, and increased model performance in the future. Three strong western competitors is better than two.

It's available to Pro users, but not through Antigravity.

Maybe? But it's so many orders of magnitude apart. I can easily do 1B tokens a day (output tokens is probably like 3M?).

When I see non technical people use that Google reply I'd be surprised if it's more than 1k output tokens, and with a tiny model. So a 3000x in output tokens, on a model at least 10x as expensive, I wouldn't be surprised if hardware usage is 30.000x for a dev that uses coding subs vs someone who uses the Google AI overview a couple of times a day.

And that's not counting the absurd difference in cache reads.

Oh, I didn't notice that they switched from 1.5 to 3 flash about six months ago. I know someone there and they talked about how 1.5 was hardened and it was a pain to do so on newer models that is wasn't worth it for a long time. But that convo was in the beginning of the year. I should have looked it up.

Unfortunately, no company can afford entire data centers for staging, and sometimes you hit an unexpected snag while scaling up tht delays the rollout beyond the initial estimate.

> But you don’t create a broken or confusing experience for the people who haven’t been added to the rollout group yet.

It's an unfortunate downside to conflicting requirements for release-engineering and marketing urgency. In a perfect world, rollout would go from 0-100% instantly, coinciding with the release of marketing material.

In the real world, the trade-offs are either the marketing lands first for some/most people, or delaying marketing is until after rollout reaches, 100%, at which point you're scooped by tech blogs, Twitter AI influencers, and regular media, and immediately lose framing the release from the jump.

Weirdly, the post OP linked says:

> Gemini 4 Argon is available today for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers

[dead]

Same. It just told me "agent execution terminated due to an error". There was a little chevron underneath it that let me expand the error to view more. I was hoping to see what the error was, so I clicked it, and it said... "agent execution terminated due to an error".

It's crazy to me how care there is in most of these vibe-coded vibe-coding harnesses. I don't like oai's models much but I have to say their UI has by far the best attention to detail of any major player.

The internet and gaming has ruined my brain because scuffed was a way to describe a bad dungeon run in mythic plus dungeons in WoW, or a bad tower dive in LoL a few years ago. I see scuffed and think "here's a WoW/League knower".

HP is the other company to consider as analogous. And maybe more explicitly so, as they had a similar "engineering first" internal culture that degraded markedly over time to be a shadow of their former self.

And took similar companies that were quality engineering focused -- like DEC or Palm -- down with them through acquisition.

Yes, there's been a huge degradation in the reliability and usefulness of Google's digital assistant following its incorporation of "AI".

On Android, the public APIs available for digital assistants are more limited than the ones that Google gets to use for their own products. So if you want a digital assistant and you'd like to be able to hold a button on your phone and have it open a thread with an LLM (even if your screen is off), your digital assistant has to be Gemini. You can configure ChatGPT or Claude in its place, but then they can't manipulate or interact with apps in your phone very much. Or you can use an app like that for all of your LLM use but you can't conveniently summon it.

Similarly, you can run local LLMs on your Google Pixel smartphone, but if you want them to be hardware accelerated using the chip that's included for that very purpose on your phone... it has to be Google's models via Google's apps. So you can't say "alright, a fast, local model which sounds great, but I want one that is trained to always run a search before answering, in a harness with good search tools for answering the kinds of practical questions I often ask", you're actually not free to put that together in a practicable way.

So there is indeed some competition here. But it's not really fair competition.

I skip past them to the actual search results which tend to be much better.

Yeah maybe I've just become used to how much I can use Flash 3.7/3.8 but on the less expensive Ultra plan I basically never exhaust my quota even when working over multiple projects, but this was pretty much immediate. I did ask it to audit a project but still, I do that in Flash regularly and it's not especially costly.