I'll use this opportunity while it's still early to share my experience with Argon.

I got it via the "Pro" plan, exclusively for personal task usage. So no agentic programming.

For starters, the limits are dreadfully low. Five messages on medium is already enough to trigger a 4 hour cooldown. Secondly, the best part is the integration with Google search and Maps. Makes it seamless for trip planning. Lastly it's the only "SOTA" model in a long time that has actively hallucinated details. I don't know if it's because the Gemini harness is not asking it to verify information, but I've had some real Deepseek V3-like lies in responses.

Either way, I find it difficult to get invested in Gemini because nobody will have access to Carbon for a few months anyways.

I similarly had Argon respond with a vast hallucination. It surprised me because it wasn't a little wrong on the details but a fully false verbose response that completely fabricated fabricated everything. I'd recently had Claude Code help me create transcripts for some audio notes from my mother in law and decided to see how some other models would handle the same task sans harness. Argon made up a long conversation from a police sting operation with under cover operatives seemingly just because it read the file names and identified that they would have come from a recording device.

Honestly the fiction writing was pretty impressive!

Yeah... Given that everyone else seems to make models available either immediately or within days of announcement, idk why Google feels it's competitive or acceptable to do these 'available at some point' releases.

Capabilities are also improving so fast that this fomo doesn't really keep people excited. If I can't run it, I'll sorta just click off. And given how they handled the Argon release, I've not even bothered look at this Carbon one. Fully expected it to not be usable yet.

hmm, I haven't tried Carbon yet. But I have been using Argon on and off via agent-shell - https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell and unofficial ACP client.

In my limited usage, it has fixed issues which has not been correctly fixed by sol-6.1 (medium) - https://github.com/auto-gnufied/markdown-modern/commit/a189a...

I am also using it via Google pro tier and did not immediately run into quota issues. But as someone else said in previous discussion of this - Google Pro tier already includes lot of stuff (including Youtube premium etc), the AI plans are just a nice addon.

> I find it difficult to get invested in Gemini because nobody will have access to Carbon for a few months anyways.

I feel like you're being overly dramatic here. Argon was 13 - 15 days.

Argon was announced September 30, made available on October 13 to Ultra everywhere, and Pro in the Gemini App. Pro plans got Argon on October 15 in AGY.

This is the first time they've slow-rolled a model. Who knows how long they'll wait on Carbon.

The Ultra-lite plans ($99/month) get some pretty good quota where you can actually use Argon some more. Maybe Google shouldn't be grouping together plans, but it should also be noted that $20/month also gets you 5TB of storage on Drive. If you paid for Dropbox, you get 3TB for $18/month (without any AI model usage).

(googler, opinions are my own)

> For starters, the limits are dreadfully low.

That's the problem for me. Google can have the world's best model; it doesn't matter to me, because I effectively can't use it.

Both Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1 are extremely good and provide a lot of inference on their $200 plans, and then there are the Chinese models - DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, MiMo, and StepFun all offer a lot of value per cost.

At the moment, I don't see a niche where it makes sense to use Google's models, regardless of how good they are.

> For starters, the limits are dreadfully low. Five messages on medium is already enough to trigger a 4 hour cooldown.

Is that chat messages that involve tool calls (web search, file reads, etc) or actually just messages?

When I'm on the $20/month OpenAI plan, I can get about 3-5 turns out of Astra before the 5 hour limit is up.

When Fable was on the $20/month Anthropic plan, I remember getting about the same.

3-4 turns out of the $20/month plan would seem about par with other providers for their best model, but really Carbon should occupy that slot, not Argon.

If Argon's limits are that low, it wouldn't make sense to use that plan for anything when models of similar intelligence are available with much higher limits on other $20 plans.

In my experience with antigravity-cli for coding Argon gets the task finished much faster than 3.8 Flash and with a higher quality output. The quotas on Pro are about 2 hours of usage per week for Argon. Its a really nice model to use. Only thing that is annoying is that it still struggles with tool use on the gemini website.

Same. I subscribed to Gemini pro and requested a refund literally the same day. Asked it to put a technical image on a presentation (gave it the image) and it kept generating a different image of a peaceful landscape... Yeah, very pleasant but totally unrelated.

> because nobody will have access to Carbon for a few months anyways

From Google saying that Argon would be 'available soon' (as they did just now for Carbon), it took them 13 days to release it. So... unclear that Carbon won't see the same trajectory.

Agreed on the limits, they're quite frustrating. I've still been preferring Argon to Opus 5.5 though, because even though Argon gets details wrong, I find that it's much more creative and willing to explore ideas. In my experience Opus tends to be rather condescending and won't make room for less orthodox ideas to develop. For what I'm doing, I'd much rather have good ideas that I implement mostly by hand rather than regressing to the mean and have the LLM write the code.

Note that Argon was rolled out for IDEs for people on paid AI Pro on Oct 15/Oct 16 (a couple days after Ultra users), but of course, usage limits are extremely low

It's kind of an odd release. Yes, it's technically the top intelligence model by like one point above Claude according to Artificial Analysis, but it's like barely cheaper?

It looks like the best sort of bang for your buck is still GPT Sol and GPT Astra. Claude and Gemini have just been going for that number one intelligence spot by sacrificing a lot of efficiency.

It does sort of show their hands a bit that their larger goals might be outside of just consumer sales but also seeking hyper intelligence that could bring value in new ways of discovery (if it ends up being a legit outlet for such things consistently)

> has actively hallucinated details

Gemini models always suffered from this. They were almost always best in terms of intelligence, but one of the worst to use in practice, because they have a lot of failure modes on simple tasks that simply give factually incorrect answers, or completely break and output gibberish.

Yeah that "Pro" usage is a joke! I wish google paid more attention to what the people want! it's a shame I loved Gemini 2.5 and 3 when they first came out they were super amazing!

>Lastly it's the only "SOTA" model in a long time that has actively hallucinated details. I don't know if it's because the Gemini harness is not asking it to verify information, but I've had some real Deepseek V3-like lies in responses.

I don't know what it is about Google models, but they are the worst at hallucinations. I don't understand how they can so consistently be this bad.

> Lastly it's the only "SOTA" model in a long time that has actively hallucinated details.

Yesterday I used Google AI-Search (so Gemini Flash 3.5?) for opinions on a traffic accident and it continously constructed law-interpretations and then referenced the wrong paragraphs. It talked about rules on road-crossings and cited paragraphs pertaining to alcohol intoxication as sources.

I have it on $200 Ultra and it feels like Opus 5.5 (I do not think about limits) rather than gpt-6* models where I constantly hit a wall.

I had the same experience. 4 messages on medium triggers the cooldown. The utility isn't really relevant if you're on the Pro plan.

I have experienced all of this too. I also find Argon still seems to have the sycophancy problem that some of the other labs have stamped out to a large degree.

Yeah, I thought it was just me - it hallucinates more than Flash, Flash-lite and Pro.

I’ve had good experience coding with it. In a bit of an ironical twist I now find Gemini a much better coder and Claude a much better search engine.

same. I have Pro plan so I was pretty excited when Argon was released. But it was such a disappointment.

the problem with gemini is the whole app itself, not the model.

when you use other chat app, like chatgpt or deepseek chat, the app will use web search for everything to verify. and if it can not find anything useful, or the current fact is disputed, it will try to call web search tool again and again until the consensus.

meanwhile gemini will refuse to do web search if possible, and only do it a single time if demanded. worse, it uses the same result from google search, so the top ranking answers are almost all SEO garbage.

since then I just stopped asking gemini again. and I don't think the newer model will change the situation.

It is expensive as hell. That said, on my weird personal benchmark (https://botbowlbench.com/) it reliably beats Opus 5.5, which surprised me a fair bit.

Arena.ai has reviewed it using many tasks against SOTA models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO2I3ueVQrk&lc=UgxRXtipA3QbA...

tldr; it's not as good as opus 5.5

I am having a very positive experience with Argon: since it was launched I accessed it through Ultragravity and connected via a Google Cloud account. For one month I have been trying to move the needle in SHA256 cryptoanalysis with Claude to not avail and Argon moved "two needles".

Since then I tried it for experimenting on diverse fields. For example, this week there was a discussion here in HN about the non-continuation of Python funding on the JIT, so I "played" again to removing the GIL and moving to the JIT in Python, it did it. I played with many other things, even the Riemann Hypothesis (it just removed their rational parameter rounding only moves 0.875 towards 0.87495702, nothing significant though).

Many other relatively great things were done this week in parallel. I have some budget for research.

It's terrible. I tried it via API in OpenCode. It's so slow, and the lack of reasoning output makes it feel even slower. And I also noticed the lies. I gave it a high-res image of a map to classify labelled locations, and it started going on about how smart it was for the map creator to use squares as the symbol for one of the categories of labelled places, and gave me a list of all the places with squares along with their category, but the map has no squares. It's circles, triangles, and stars.

> Makes it seamless for trip planning.

Trip planning is the most often used use-case for agents/bots I see in marketing. I'm lucky to travel once a year, but if I did have a trip, I wouldn't feel comfortable letting an LLM take the wheel. Too many variables for wrong flight or room, closed locations in itinerary, etc.

Now, critical server infrastructure? Sure, have at it Claude, make no mistakes!

The best [whatever] is the one that is the most available.

> Lastly it's the only "SOTA" model in a long time that has actively hallucinated details

Could you expand on this? I’ve never seen a frontier model that doesn’t hallucinate details fairly often, what do you mean by “actively” here?

[flagged]

Weird, using AGY I get tons of argon and its on a weekly limit.