Argon, Carbon, Hydrogen?
Luna, Terra, Sol, Astra, Betelgeuse?
and then it says for free users there is only "automatic" and you will get Gemini 4 Hydrogen "when it's the appropriate model for the prompt". Yeah sure Google, whatever, I don't care about Gemini models anymore. Too hard to access, constant rugpulls, intransparent pricing, many, MANY outages and in general very unreliable. At this point I just want Google to fail.
The naming scheme alone has no rhyme or reason. Model names should not be a source of cognitive load.
Having said this, I don't defend this trend at all and also think a model picker ought to be good enough with at most three tiers rather than five or so with sometimes like five effort levels each for 25 combos. I refuse to believe we need this granularity.
Anthropic - Literary scale.
Google - random elements with no clear relation to model value/capacity.
The new naming scheme seems shockingly poor though, “Pro” and “Flash” made intuitive sense to me, and Anthropic and OpenAI kept a sense of scale. Nobody is going to intuitively understand “Oh yes, Hydrogen is smaller than Carbon”, even though it is.
I have found it a good subagent workhorse for code implementation, with some higher level model doing the spec and review.
Every single time a Google model comes out, an army of Anthropic shills sidetrack the discussion.
Can we look at what the model does and discuss whether Google is still in the game or not? (naming models and whether you need to access it by clicking a drop-down menu or making a prayer ain't really relevant)
I quit using Gemini models months ago because they are incomprehensible to understand in terms of when to use them and how to navigate the terrible GCP and Gemini UI. It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare.