Gemini 4 Carbon - Hacker News

Posted by acossta 6 hours ago

727 points | 593 commentspage 3

nickandbro 6 hours ago|

Wow, $2/$10 for input and output even if just for introductory pricing is an incredible deal. Wonder how token efficient it is.

miyuru 6 hours ago||

it says on footnote "After the introductory period expires, the price of $4 per 1M input tokens and $20 per 1M output tokens will apply."

brainwad 5 hours ago||

But if they keep releasing a model every month, then the frontier model will keep being perpetually half price?

p_l 1 hour ago||

The point of the lower pricing is to move compute (and sysadmin) capacity around

JacobAsmuth 5 hours ago||

You can check out the token usage on AA. It used ~30% fewer tokens than Opus.

quicklywilliam 2 hours ago||

Well, at least the name is honest

https://www.ft.com/content/8158cb5a-4bbd-43fd-b329-15a54e842...

alpineman 2 hours ago||

Nice try to distract from a horrible earnings release!

WarmWash 6 hours ago||

Where is 4 flash?

3.8 flash is a really solid "everyday" model. Was hoping a new flash model would be the next release.

mattlondon 5 hours ago|

Agreed. I was really looking forward to 4 Flash. 3.8 Flash has been my favourite model and daily driver for a little while now.

But to be honest I am now not sure if Argon was the flash model and this Carbon is pro? It's very confusing.

droidjj 6 hours ago||

I'm assuming this is a post-train of Argon ("Building on Gemini 4 Argon, which was launched two weeks ago, Carbon illustrates the pace at which we’re pushing the frontier forward."), but does anyone know for sure? The post isn't clear.

notatoad 6 hours ago|

the rumour mill the last two weeks has been referring to carbon and argon as "checkpoints" of the same model

iamdelirium 6 hours ago|||

That's generally how models are made. There's several candidate checkpoints and experimentation going on.

alex_duf 6 hours ago|||

are we that much in a rush that we need to release checkpoints this close? or maybe argon was a little rushed?

james2doyle 6 hours ago||

> Gemini 4 Carbon will launch at the same introductory price 1 as Argon at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off input token price.

So more capable and same price? I can at least appreciate that

paxy 6 hours ago||

While there are a hundred different evals it seems to me that we've settled on crowning the #1 coding model as the best model. So in those terms this is still behind Opus 5.5 and Astra.

nostrebored 3 hours ago|

Why would you think so? From the info here it could be measurably better?

kisamoto 2 hours ago||

I'm on a Workspace Pro subscription and the models I have are (in order of the dropdown on gemini.google.com):

    - 3.6 Flash
    - 3.8 Thinking
    - 3.1 Pro

I would love to sign up to Antigravity to try out these new Gemini 4 models but the Antigravity pricing page - https://antigravity.google/pricing - recommends me (a "Developer") to "Get Ultra". But that leads me to an error page, because Ultra is only available for personal accounts apparently "Sign in to your personal account. Switch to a personal Google Account to access Google One.".

Back I go to the Antigravity pricing page and there is a tier "For Organisations". But now I have the option of either contacting sales (are you kidding me?) or "Start now via the API".

So I'm out - I want a simple subscription like Claude or Codex. I don't want API enterprise pricing for a 2 person organisation. I could use my personal account but I'm already paying increased Google Workspace prices to access Gemini and I can't even use the latest models with that.

If someone at Google sees this, flag this ridiculous behaviour please and get things under control. It should be a very clear process - don't show me things I can't access. Price things consistently and please just make things logical.

n_u 5 hours ago||

Gemini Argon was released a few weeks ago.[1] I'm curious how the development cycle works behind the scenes that allows them to release two models in such short succession. Do they have multiple teams working on different models?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073879

CuriouslyC 4 hours ago|

Likely they did a distillation run on a later checkpoint of a large internal teacher model, probably with some tuning of the distillation process based on early public results with Argon. RL is the expensive/time consuming step, they should be able to distill down from a checkpoint with the stamp of approval pretty quickly.

WarmWash 6 hours ago|

75% chance OAI or Anthropic take the crown back within a week?

MostlyStable 6 hours ago|

Polymarket [0] thinks it's 55% Anthropic, 38% google by the end of the year. Anthropic /OAI 62% combined.

[0] https://polymarket.us/event/company1-2026-12-31

mlinsey 5 hours ago||

That market resolves using the arena.ai text leaderboard, where Argon was already #1 over Opus 5.5. Coding is way more economically consequential, and I think the current gap between Anthropic and Google is very wide there (at least, before this Carbon release)

MostlyStable 5 hours ago|||

That's a good point. The coding specific question (which still uses the arena.ai leaderboard, just the coding version instead of text version), has Anthropic at 66% at Anthropic/OAI at just shy of 80%. That's probably more representative even if Arena.ai isn't my favorite benchmarking site.

Actually....looking in more depth I may have to upgrade to something stronger than "not my favorite benchmarking site". The first OAI model on there is GPT 5.4 at 31....that's not really credible.

https://polymarket.us/event/code1-2026-12-31

nostrebored 4 hours ago|||

I’ve been primarily using agy cli and argon for the last week and I’m fairly satisfied. Rarely am I looking to go back to opus and it seems much much better at model training and conceptual math

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