Is Argon "pro" and Carbon "ultra"?
Is Argon obsolete now? Does Carbon replace it or live alongside of it?
Very confusing naming!
Makes me think it's further post-training of the same model.
Or you might get Gemini 5 Arizona.
Argon is like Sonnet
I suspect they're using a new naming convention because they had previous contractual obligations tied to the "pro" and "flash" naming, and by switching to a new naming schema they avoid those commitments.
Does that mean Anthropic now has a copy of Google's source code?
[EDIT]: thanks to people in the know for their answers.
Follow-up question:
if Anthropic models run in a Google cage, does that not also mean Google can distill Anthropic models even easier (both fast and unseen)?
Anthropic is indeed trusting Google and other companies they rent compute from. Distilling or stealing the weights would be a contract violation, and would wreck other business relationships. I would be less worried about Google doing this, and more concerned if there is some sketchy neocloud in a van offering suspiciously low pricing.
Not really in the interest of the cloud org to allow that, they don't really care how well deepmind is doing as long as they can sell TPU and API (incl. reselling openai and anthropic).
I'm not going to comment on others use of Carbon except to say some article that came out before Argon's external launch saying Googlers hate it was nonsense. Not to say everyone loved it all the time.
I use Carbon heavily and am quite happy with it. For complex designs I may have it and Opus iterate back and forth on the design. They have their own strengths and Opus 5.5 is great, but I use Gemini far more than I do Opus at this point. I know a lot of the jagged edges of Gemini better than Opus though, so take that as you will.
3.8 Flash + /boost is very capable.
And do you have advice on how best to use Gemini models? It seems like my usual strategy of iterating on plan md file -> implement based on plan doesn't seem to work, 3.8 tends to rewrite the plan too often removing crucial parts when iterating.
https://www.ft.com/content/8158cb5a-4bbd-43fd-b329-15a54e842...
Is it a variant of Argon? A different model? The next version? It seems like this is a separate class (like Anthropic's Mythos).
anyway, its needlessly confusing.
deepmind should get rid of those antigravity ppl they're a joke and sabotaging the model's reputation.
Tried 4 Argon, and it's very much different from 3.1, felt very much the same as any other Frontier, just without the intelligence.
personally i like 4 Argon, it's very clever for me in a very different way comparing to the other two (especially via api) but when it comes to the google products.. sigh. nobody who's actually working on these products really cares about them in google now (maybe notebooklm is the rare exception), they're either not dogfooding themselves or somehow intentionally poisoning the experience on purpose, or simply inqualified. poor gemini is suffering in agy i can tell, it struggles so much and wont even use simple tools properly. if you put it in any good 3rd party harness out there it's flexing way better than agy and this tells a lot.
What harness are you using with Argon?
After all they had Nano Banana for years.