This was rolled out RIGHT away, as when I just went to use Gemini, seeing 3.8 Flash be replaced with "4 Hydrogen" was less hype and more a thought along the line of "What [on Earth] is Gemini Hydrogen???", then me going here to figure it out.

This model naming scheme works for separate products, but using elements, molecules, etc. for products you're supposed to compare with each other... Not very helpful.

If anything, my intuition would say that Hydrogen is more powerful than Argon... I don't know. Not liking this naming scheme trend.

OMG, it rolled out on my paid Google Workspace account already too! What a change from ~"wait 8 weeks or more from google.com rollout to <yourdomain> rollout"

Thanks any Googlers who had a hand in this

It's the equivalent of Gemini Flash, judging by the API price. I just tried it in the Gemini app, it's much better than the previous version.

Yea, it’s Terra 6.1 and Sonnet 5.5 level performance, per the benchmarks. Like you, I was left wondering whether this was better or worse than Argon, etc. It’s not intuitive; gotta read the fine print.

I don't think it's good scheme to follow but google is just following the trend of anthropic and OpenAI set up. I don't think anyone can understand Anthropic's Model naming scale with Haiku, opus, fable and Mythos. Similar with the OpenAI tera and other models in their line up.

They just trying to register the model names into our mind. Now a days we remember Fable, Opus, Sonnet. I think Google trying to do the same.

Google's work culture is very amoebic. Teams operate like small startups each with their own complete full stack dev and business team that reports metrics back to upper management. You get a lot of innovation from this but a consequence from is that you get these very siloed and competitive teams each rushing to "make a name" for themselves rather than envisioning a product that slots in nicely with the rest of the ecosystem.

I got it too on my paid workspace plan. But for the pro model it’s still says 3.1…

I'm still not sure if Carbon is meant to replace Argon or meant to be used alongside it?

For Google Workspace users: please replace the ancient 3.1 Pro in Gemini. I think it's 10 months old...

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Naming an AI model Argon will never not be hilarious to me.

It doesn't do anything! It's inert!

The general trend -- naming models classes after objects from some implicitly ordered set -- was started by Anthropic. It's generally fine, but they didn't leave enough headroom for their largest models, so the implied ordering for opus/fable/mythos is kind of muddled to the average person.

Small/medium/large/etc. has the most easily deducible ordering, but it's not great from a marketing perspective and also has headroom issues unless you're ok with names like gpt-8-xxxxl.

OpenAI's naming is probably the best. The ordering is easily deducible and there's plenty of headroom in both directions. Tons of cool sci-fi sounding names still on the table, and it also comes with the implication that they're approaching a singularity.

I don't know what Google is doing. It's kind of impressive to have an inconsistent ordering after only three names.

Same, my eyebrows about jumped off my face. To go from Google as normal -- product announced, rolls out randomly in some access modalities, mysteriously doesn't in others because no org talks to any other org -- to "wait wtf is this new model I didn't even hear about this" is so laughably bizarre. Not going to get used to it, I know Google.

Agreed on the naming issue and while it was novel at first it will inevitably get worse as more models get release, until decide to abandon it all together. It’s like they are setting themselves up for failure on that front lol

Look at how many AI adjacent products Google talks about in this press release along with its model names. Anthropic and OpenAI are guilty of it as well, so many models and ways of working with them right now, letting the users figure out the nuances of each.

Earlier today I found myself asking ChatGPT to research and explain exactly what Anthropic Playground is for and how specifically it may differ for my tasks from Anthropic Workspace, Chat, Code, and API credits. I chose ChatGPT Sol 6.1 high for this task going on gut feel, hoping it was the best model to handle that job without wasting my precious Claude tokens.

the naming scheme "trend" (opus/sonnet/haiku vs luna/terra/sol/astra) is just fine. It's just Google's version of it that sucks.

Yes the naming is nonsensical, because the intelligence ranking is this (with atomic numbers in parentheses for those that don't have the periodic table memorized):

Carbon (6) > Hydrogen (1) > Argon (18).

Double nonsense because it appears Hydrogen is in fact a smaller model than Argon, in which case this should obviously be released as "Gemini 4.1 Hydrogen" or something.

What they probably should've done if they really wanted to use elements is to do noble gases, and start these first three models in the middle (to leave room for bigger/smaller models in the future).

So you'd have:

Argon => Argon (18)

Hydrogen => Krypton (36)

Carbon => Xenon (54)

Not exactly because as noted it appears hydrogen is in fact the smaller model, but then this should be (again) 4.1 or something.

And they'd leave space for a truly massive model if needed (Radon) and two slots for much smaller models, with Helium (2) presumably being a model that could be run on basically any consumer device.

Maybe the confusion is the plan; keep people talking.

No matter what you do you can't go wrong if you spin it right!

cargo culting

"Claude and Codex have cool names, they are more successful than us, so therefore if we give gemini cool names we'll be successful too"

-marketing drone, probably

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