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Posted by 737max 6 hours ago

Gemini 4 Argon(deepmind.google)
See also: Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50074869
840 points | 665 commentspage 3
freakynit 6 hours ago|
"Argon autonomously turns raw video to a physics-accurate simulation, estimating depth and physical boundaries, and writing the exact simulation code required to replicate those real-world environments."

This is crazy if it can work accurately.

ArashEdalat 6 hours ago||
Geometry could be understood today with the model but what also really matters is the sensing, friction, mass how smooth the subjects are, dexterity is a very difficult problem so solve, not sure how simulations could handle such factors
verdverm 6 hours ago||
Game engines have many of these features. At one point, iirc, Unity was positioning to be the simulation environment for world model agents before we spoke about it in these words.
kridsdale1 3 hours ago||
Every animal can do this, in order to run and jump and catch.
34679 2 hours ago||
And because of technology like this, soon every robot will be able to as well.
amai 5 hours ago||
A model that didn‘t break out of its sandbox and hacked other websites cannot be good.
Andrex 1 hour ago||
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/18/google-ge...

?

l0kihardt 3 hours ago|||
To be fair, Google has a real security team.
deniska 4 hours ago|||
Or maybe Google actually knows how to set up a VM.
grim_io 2 hours ago|||
Argon has been hacking Google internally for years!

Related funny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlTNN0gvkLM

dandaka 4 hours ago|||
They just don't know yet, wait for a few months
karp773 3 hours ago||
People complain about the slop-release. Who knows, maybe it is the first self-release by an AI model in history.
tireonfire 6 hours ago||
I have the Free AI Pro plan from when I purchased my Pixel 11 Pro. I still don't have Argon in AGY nor web nor Gemini app. I have a free product and still feel cheated.
sureglymop 6 hours ago||
When you are on "gemini.google.com" there is a little lock icon next to Gemini 3 and Gemini 4. When you click it you get the prompt to subscribe (pay). Once you have successfully done so, the Gemini 4 option disappears!

Pretty misleading.

ezfe 6 hours ago|
Maybe it’s just an incomplete rollout not fraud lol
verdverm 6 hours ago||
don't attribute to malice that which can equally be due to incompetence
peheje 5 hours ago||
Something can be misleading whether or not anyone meant it to.
verdverm 4 hours ago||
I agree and do not think our comments are in contention.
ariwilson 3 hours ago||
I ran it through my own coding eval today using pi/OpenRouter (11 small bug fixes from my own projects). It solved 10 of 11. Compared to Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol, a median run cost me $0.52 vs $0.18 for Sonnet and $0.09 for Sol, and took ~4 minutes vs 32 seconds and ~1.5 minutes.

It thinks a ton, ~24k output tokens a run vs ~3k for Sonnet. It missed a solution by thinking its way into a 10 min timeoout.

Something to look out for - if you're using pi, it doesn't have Argon in its catalog yet and reports cost at Kimi's rates, about a third of what OpenRouter actually bills.

a11r 5 hours ago||
I seriously doubt their ability to double API prices on Dec 1. Token prices are in a clear downward trend and Google should maximize revenue by competing for volume. Currently OpenAI is the only US frontier lab trying to seriously compete with open-weight models that you can run yourself for an order of magnitude lower than what frontier labs want to charge
mattmaroon 5 hours ago||
I’m running 6.1 sol as my main driver on Hermes these days. It does so much for so little cost.
bitexploder 3 hours ago||
It actually finishes things for you? It's been unusably slow for me. Worse than batch mode anything.
sidibe 5 hours ago||
The goal is to move people along. By then they'll have something as performant but cheaper for them
pietz 6 hours ago||
I'm open to Google winning me over again, but there isn't enough hype in the world to do it. They will need to earn it after these disappointing 6 months.
swaptr 6 hours ago|
I appreciate how it's being integrated into the Google ecosystem, but the user experience still feels unpolished when actually using the system. The marketing, however, is impressive.
ssernikk 1 hour ago||
It's nice to have it available for more complex tasks, but I'll stick with 3.8 Flash thanks to its high output speed. I really like it for fast iteration and prototyping.
isityettime 6 hours ago|
Meanwhile, here's Gemini in practice:

Me: Gemini, navigate to nearest McDonalds.

Gemini: [Lists 10 McDonalds locations wnd asks which I want.]

Me: What were the priginal instructions just now?

Gemini: [Recites imperatives about tone and content from its memory system.]

Me: No. I told you to navigate to the NEAREST McDonalds. There's only one NEAREST McDonalds. Do that one.

Gemini: My mistake, navigating to the nearest McDonalds. [Opens Maps, navigating to a McDonalds across town.]

didibus 6 hours ago||
Pretty sure your phone assistant isn't using their best model. It's probably using one of the old flash models no?
elxr 4 hours ago|||
The model used is irrelevant when there's the critical issue where their "AI" assistant can't understand the word "nearest". Literally worse than a second-grade understanding of English.

I also have had shockingly bad results with gemini on android. Ended up giving up on it after a few months. Silly silly google with their trademark UX polish and attention to usability.

kingstnap 6 hours ago||||
When you ask stuff in your car on android auto it uses 3.5 flash-lite. The response details would include it in the logs.

Flash lite is very noticeably more idiotic than 3.8 Flash. It's why the quick AI overview is often much worse than the AI mode one.

Capricorn2481 4 hours ago|||
As an android user, this worked perfectly like 10 years ago.
isityettime 2 hours ago||
Yes, there's been a huge degradation in the reliability and usefulness of Google's digital assistant following its incorporation of "AI".
Capricorn2481 2 hours ago||
It's really puzzling. I was really happy with the original assistant, now it feels slower at literally everything.
compiler-guy 5 hours ago|||
This reflects pretty much every result of mine from Google these days. Not just navigation, but search too.

The only thing I can figure is that Google's consumer-facing free-to-use models are set to "reason as fast as possible with only the most basic plausibility checks." I have to correct them like this every single time.

bornfreddy 4 hours ago|||
Genuinely curious: why do you use them then? It's not like there is no competition in this area.
isityettime 2 hours ago|||
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.

compiler-guy 3 hours ago|||
I skip past them to the actual search results which tend to be much better.
sm-silversight 5 hours ago|||
Uh, yes, of course. search results are fast & cheap & free, why would they use the good models?
ASalazarMX 5 hours ago|||
The first law of robotics prevents it from facilitating regular ingestion of low-quality nutrients.
dgunay 3 hours ago|||
Gemini Flash is very dumb and gimped. Recent experience:

1. I ask it to list out all my old Keep notes that are just throwaway task lists, reminders, etc. to propose deleting them.

2. It comes up with like 4 of them (I know for a fact there are dozens, if not hundreds). I ask it for an exhaustive list.

3. I see its thinking trace briefly show "Refusing to produce an exhaustive list..." and then it says "Yes, that is all of them."

Not sure whether it's lack of intelligence, bad tools, or both, but that was extremely frustrating to see.

sva_ 3 hours ago|||
My Gemini app on Android does not even have an exact location permission you could give it, so I'm not sure how you think that would work?

If it had exact location access people would be crying that Gemini steals their location data.

gorbot 5 hours ago|||
this is like that tiktok guy who asks the spoken ChatGPT model very simple questions, like 'count down from 60', or 'how many e's in seventeen' or whatever and the model shits the bed every time it's hilarious

I think these companies have good models but expose them poorly like others have mentioned

staticman2 5 hours ago|||
Often it seems like the problem with the Gemini apps is the harness, not the model itself. For example if I upload an image PDF it recognizes text worse than if I use the API.
isityettime 2 hours ago||
Agreed! I feel that they're pouring all of this work into models and then squandering that work by integrating them into bad products.
RajuChacha108 5 hours ago|||
Is this from you car ? Gemini in car is probably less intelligent than a spider.

I tell it to "Play Let it go from frozen". It plays it on youtube music. 5 seconds later I tell it again 'Play let it go from frozen" it then just dies saying "I can't play videos in car".

foota 5 hours ago|||
The auto version is extra horrible because what it reads to you is just a summary of what the model actually said. I don't ask it anything when driving because it's too frustrating.
dyauspitr 5 hours ago|||
Yeah, whatever they have running on Google Maps is probably a pretty low tier model, but it is total trash. I’ve only used it twice though and that’s when it first came out. I don’t know if there have been any changes since then. The main problem is I felt like it was not keeping track of the context of the session.
LewisOrton 5 hours ago|||
Gemini models are in fact very good. Google's harness(es) for Gemini are nightmares, terrible
LewisOrton 5 hours ago||
ngl gemini is helping to provide (real helpful, not the ones giving runarounds) customer services in one of my own products.

i benchmarked 20+ models in real worlds and gemini families are the best (highest customer satisfaction)

jeffbee 6 hours ago|||
It sounds like the tool call is probably not grounded with your precise position.
moffkalast 6 hours ago|||
Sounds like it might not have your precise location in context?
jabroni_salad 5 hours ago||
which is more or less the crux of the problem android auto's gemini implementation. It sometimes does not even know that it is in a car. The ghome implementation is also like this.
polynomial 5 hours ago||
I hate to be that guy, but Tesla's Grok doesn't seem to have that problem.
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