| ▲ | artdigital a day ago |
| There were so many memes about “Gemini Hydrogen” after they released Carbon. That they actually released a model named Hydrogen makes this very funny But a new Flash model is very welcome. Argon and Carbon are very slow. In the time it takes for them to complete a single task, Opus already managed to complete multiple things. They’re so slow, I started using 3.8 Flash over them. (A lot of it is also because of how terrible agy is. Before doing any task, Gemini feels the need to hover up a bazillion files into its context when the task is something simple like “update the docs of this controller”) Also this sounds like Argon is dead now |
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| ▲ | thomasahle a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| > There were so many memes about “Gemini Hydrogen” after they released Carbon Is Carbon actually released yet? |
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| ▲ | nmfisher 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, I pulled the trigger to get a Google AI sub so I've been using it today. It's pretty decent, but dear lord it is slow. It's bad enough that I'm already thinking about cancelling. | |
| ▲ | kvnrw a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | yes, it was made available on November 10 https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge... | | |
| ▲ | guelo a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It's only available on the $100 plan not the $20 plan. | | |
| ▲ | judge2020 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Google’s segmentation here is keeping them from using their existing account dominance to eat away at OpenAI and Anthropic personal subscriptions, tbh. Adopt a lower usage limit for Carbon on the $20 plan and it’s suddenly insane value. | | |
| ▲ | rastapanda 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Given you get YouTube premium, file/photo storage, and $10 a month back in GCP credit which you can use on more tokens (including carbon). It already feels like great value to me, that said how much you get out of it will depend how deep you're in Google's ecosystem. | | |
| ▲ | rafaelmn 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | YouTube Premium is only personal so it's useless for me I'm already paying for family plan, and what do I need 20TB of cloud storage for to update to 100$ plan - basically it's a useless bundle for me not a value proposition beyond the 20$ with their usage limits I saw. | | |
| ▲ | mark_l_watson 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Same for me. I find myself using Google’s $20/month plan, plus running really good local models with occasional use of Deepseek Harness with their flash model, occasionally a $6/month Alibaba subscription for their strong qwen-3.8-max model, and about every third month getting a Anthropic subscription if I need more access to Opus. This is a lot of purchasing complexity for an old retired guy like myself! I wish Google had finer grained $30/month and $40/month subs: then I would probably just make my life easier by only using local models and Google (their sub also provides some Opus, but the Anthropic subscription is better if all you care about is Opus or Fable.) |
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| ▲ | judge2020 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Unfortunately it's YouTube Premium Lite which doesn't include YouTube Music :/ | |
| ▲ | jack_pp 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What subscription are you talking about and is this US only? My Google one sub doesn't say anything about YouTube premium and gcp | | |
| ▲ | jack_pp 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | nevermind, found em but apparently it's youtube premium "lite" | | |
| ▲ | saturdaysaint 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | I find Lite to be perfect. It only adds ads to copyrighted music videos and doesn’t include YouTube Music, otherwise it’s the same as YouTube Premium. For $100/yr with lots of cloud storage and Gemini access, it’s one of the best value subscriptions out there in my book. |
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| ▲ | p_l 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | AFAIK the real issue, and also driving the pricing structure for API and the "50% discount on new model" thing, is frankly capacity of the TPUs they have. Not enough TPUs, not helped by renting some of them to Claude (lots of enterprise users there, so at least it pays to GCP, eh?) and now OpenAI |
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| ▲ | serioussecurity 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Their audience is enterprise customers, not consumers. | |
| ▲ | welferkj 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | $20 plans are basically paid demos as of now. You are barely a step above the free ad marks. | | |
| ▲ | toyg 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | They are perfectly fine for hobby projects. My only gripe is that it feels like they get slower and slower with time. |
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| ▲ | satvikpendem a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Now what about their other Carbon the language? | | | |
| ▲ | akoboldfrying a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Thanks, but that page crashes my Android phone browser. Separately, I'm surprised not to see any HN link for this (that made it to the front page) in the past few days. |
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| ▲ | p_l 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm experimenting currently with reducing the hoovering aspect in my configuration of antigravity, on the other hand at least once when I thought the model was "too deep into sauce" it turned out Argon deducted a thing I considered completely unrelated was cause for crashes I asked it to debug. |
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| ▲ | moshegramovsky 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | I actually ask it to make a list of files it wants to examine and then approve on case-by-case basis. It cut my usage substantially. One other thing I wondered about: is all that additional and possibly irrelevant information harmful? I believe that it is. I think it causes the model to make bad decisions. In long workflows, once a bad decision is made, I find it frequently compromises the rest of the implementation. So I try to keep it tightly scoped. Otherwise I get hilariously bad results sometimes. Ex: yesterday I let Argon medium run for 40 minutes. Welp, that was a big revert. |
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| ▲ | andai 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wait, I thought Gemini was the fast one? Did that change? I haven't used it in a while. Like they had really fast hardware or something. |
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| ▲ | danielbarla 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | A model can have high token / s and still be slow to complete a task. They tend to have vastly different verbosity characteristics. E.g. something like Haiku is "obviously" faster than Opus. Yet if you test Opus 5.5 on medium vs Haiku on max (because Haiku needs to be cranked pretty high on effort to be reasonably intelligent), you'll observe that Opus is ~2x faster to complete. |
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| ▲ | sleiben a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I find 3.8-flash not bad at all for simpler tasks and speed is reasonable. Pricing seems okay as well |
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| ▲ | espetro a day ago | parent | next [-] | | TBF the issue at hand is currently the harness, not the model. Gemini works specially well for coding on codex (eg behind litellm). | |
| ▲ | LeonidBugaev a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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| ▲ | bushbaba a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why these names though. And why mix it from prior names. Google is one of the worst product companies constantly rebranding. Is it Google enterprise. Google for work. Gsuite. Google workspaces. Or heck maybe next week Google Gemini 365 |
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| ▲ | dahcryn 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | you think sol luna and terra is better? At least, if you know your periodic table, there is a link to the size of the elements where hydrogen is small and argon is big. Just wondering if the new flash-lite will become helium lol. | | |
| ▲ | Sir_Twist 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The moon is smaller than the Earth, which is smaller than the sun. | |
| ▲ | bushbaba 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They at least stuck with it | |
| ▲ | sheept 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Argon is the heaviest element of three, but it’s the mid tier model in the Gemini series, so you’ve just proved your point. Luna, Terra, and Sol are in order of celestial size, and Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus are in order of length. But Hydrogen, Argon, and Carbon? Maybe they intended the order to be by density in pure form. | |
| ▲ | clippyplz 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm not sure that the atomic number for argon is more common knowledge than the fact that the earth is larger than the moon |
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| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | disgruntledphd2 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Before doing any task, Gemini feels the need to hover up a bazillion files into its context when the task is something simple like “update the docs of this controller”) Yeah, I noticed this with Argon also. It did a good job on my tasks, but the absurd amount of reading it needed to do first seemed really weird, relative to other models. It also felt more robotic than Claude or any of the other models (GLM-5.3 is basically an excited teenager, while claude is a teacher's pet (sorry Dave, I can't let you do that)). |
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| ▲ | bootsmann 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The context hovering seems to have its advantages tho. When I ask claude why a given output was produced by a given program configuration it delivers a slop wall of guesses while Argon seems to actually understand what the code does. |
