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”)
This is essentially what Anthropic does with the advisor mode and what GitHub does with their multi-model pipeline using the HydraFusion model, which is just a large set of different models with different qualities used in a pipeline to produce an answer.
What I don't understand is how they all make it work with caching in general. Looking at how the advisor mode in claude work you seem to only be billed the output tokens and cache hit on the whole session when it calls out to the advisor, making it super cheap compared to running the more expensive model for the entire session.
Pretty sure on advisor it needs to send the entire context to another model. The cost is mitigated a bit because there would be few output tokens from the advisor model normally.
Orchestrator seems to automatically delegate things to subagents as required is my read of it. This should be fine for caching.
I'm really curious how folks feel about this. I regularly use subagents, but typically make my primary implementation agent use Carbon (or equivalent).
I set up my subagents with specific models based on how complex I believe the problem space is. I'm nervous to delegate that authority to a model (since models tend to be... optimistic about their capabilities.)
That said, not every coding task is a difficult coding task. Plenty are boilerplate, plumbing, or simple test authoring that could use a flash model, so maybe this would downgrade nicely.
On the other hand, it's trivial for me to set up some guidelines to create different subagents for different task domains, and just pin those models to those tasks -- implementor (hard) and implementor (easy) or whatever.
The only reason to do this is to save usage on the subscription. but because the value for money is so terrible in antigravity, you’re better off just using Claude Opus or GPT Sol for everything.
I’m glad Google is kinda back, but today there’s no reason to code with Gemini.
Im slowly migrating more of my work to Gemini too, Gemini is a workhorse now, 1M context is huge and their reasoning took a huge leap with Argon. I'm not in software, I'm in physical engineering, and where Claude is unpredictable w.r.t. engineering risk, Gemini is steady, measured. That's been my perception, anyway.
My qualitative take to support this is that Gemini seems to have the strongest spatial reasoning that translates nicely into CAD and engineering domain challenges. Less clear, but I also suspect a better world understanding of materials and their interactions in an intuitive way. I have this sense that Claude can tell me everything there is to know about how to spec a gasket, but it’s like Gemini actually knows what a gasket feels like and can intuit what it’s going to do.
My partner runs an internal computational mechanics benchmark that hasn’t tracked progress with model advancements (flat/no progress since early 2026) until suddenly saturating from argon and carbon. My take is that it’s due to spatial reasoning (most of the challenges are programming that require a lot of shape rotation type thinking), but we don’t know just yet why Gemini is doing so much better.
Carbon is the first "better than meh" model form Google in more than half a year. It's been out for less than a week. How can you consider it "steady"? Their subscription and even the API has been terribly unstable throughout the past few days, so I'm having really trouble believing any of this.
what source could their possibly be? Argon has been out for a while now and has been solid. Even flash 3.8 is great as long as you check it's work on more complex tasks, and doesn't need 12 hours to chew through problems like claude does.
I use argon and opus daily and I can tell you I have to use opus to review argon because argon goes and build things and also creates bunch of bugs along with it. I wish it weren't but that's the reality. It's great with deep cross inspection better than claude but it's slow and still need review by another frontier model.
Whatever they thought of when they said "measured"? Is that too much to ask?
Ok, you're either a troll or you objectively don't know what you're talking about. Google should be ashamed they even released 3.8 Flash. They published models with such high frequency and always made a huge jump on benchmarks. Then they were caught, when a new version of AA came out and their numbers dropped like a stone.
Glad you found what works for you but before Carbon, Gemini models have been utter garbage for more than 6 months now. I'm happy to debate anyone on this. Even DeepMind engineers agreed with this.
Gemini 3.8 Flash is the most benchmaxxed model to date and even Argon hallucinated so much, it was impossible to use it for any professional work.
I disagree with this. Flash 3.7 and Flash 3.8 are excellent models and put (for me) Gemini back on the radar. I’ve been using them a lot since release, and still do for simple implementations and grunt work.
They’re also excellent (together with Flash-Lite) to use for consumer facing features where speed and cost matters
I've been using 3.8 Flash (and Argon and Carbon) to clean up a lot of Claude mess. But I fully agree on 3.1 Pro, it was only good for conversational stuff and some deep dives, but not for actual agent work.
I'm honestly surprised they only see 25% savings with co-trained models and special harness support. With Mjolnir bridging Opus to DeepSeek Flash over ACP we see savings of 60%.
I.e. in this context Opus is the big brains orchestrator and it delegates to DeepSeek Flash subagents?
Intriguing, I might have to try this out - I have an OpenCode Go sub for the deepseeks of the world, and a Claude sub too. Sounds like I could have the best of both worlds here.
> Orchestrator takes a dynamic, bidirectional approach between Carbon and Gemini 4 Hydrogen within the evolution of a single trajectory. For example, Carbon can start in a read-only phase to explore dependencies, resolve ambiguities, and build a concrete plan with explicit re-planning triggers. Hydrogen could then take over to write edits, update packages, and run tests. If Hydrogen hits friction, it would hand back to Carbon to inspect the state, repair the plan, and resume execution. This allows Orchestrator to reach near-Carbon task success while being faster and more quota-efficient. On Terminal-Bench 4.1, Orchestrator reached near-Carbon task success rates while, on average, consuming 24% less quota and completing 19% faster.
Is this now how e.g. Opus works now? I use Opus 5.5 on high for just about everything now, and my bill's not gone up (gone down actually). I had assumed under the hood it was doing this (e.g. I'm sure its not literally Opus doing the log checking / file searches). Towards Google's choice, I'm skeptical introducing a new concept (Orchestrator) for this is really necessary, when they could have just done it by default, unless its plainly lower quality than pinning Carbon.
I found when fable first came out when I switched from opus my usage actually went down. Personal theory was that since it was smarter it took fewer tokens to accomplish the same tasks.
Indeed, all the 4/Hydrogen submissions were from different sources, but *sigh* the exact same conversation is happening here as other threads.. almost as if it's the same topic.
I don't understand which model is supposed to be better. I think Carbon is the big model and Hydrogen the Flash equivalent? Only because of a Twitter leak though. Like I have no earthly idea based on the naming.
There is nothing confusing about it if you're at least a little bit educated. If anything, they are the least confusing, Ant drops the ball at opus->fable.
For OpenAI, it's:
Luna, means "moon", smallest.
Terra, means "earth", bigger than the moon.
Sol, means "sun", the biggest object in the solar system.
Astra, plural of the word "astrum" which means "star".
All of those are deducible, sure. The problem is that the pattern works only when they are all listed together. Person sees the list and can logically infer where they belong. But when I see the single model name detached from it's siblings, like "OAI releases new Terra 7.7" headline, for quite a long time I had zero idea where it belongs just from my memory. Was that a big model, a small model, a medium model - no idea. Now after a few HN topics I do remember the lineup and can place the new announce where it belongs.
To be fair, I knew all of those words already, and it never even occured to me that these names are supposed to be compared to eachother to indicate size or something. So, at least to me, it's not that it confuses me, it just imparted no information, because a collection of astronomical names and terms doesn't automatically indicate an ordering to me, it just indicates that nerds like naming their stuff after scientific terms and concepts, sci-fi stuff, etc.
I mean, this is what numbers are for. And not only do numbers indicate ordering(without having to do a mapping through severely atrophied school science class knowledge from decades ago), they can also convey meaningful size information using the wonderful technology of units of measurement.
I refuse to walk among you rabble. You rabid mouth-breathers. I refuse I tell you.
The only models worth _my_ time are Σεληνη, Γη, Ἡλιος and Αστρα.
I don’t know what to tell you illiterate heretics other than you should know you are bad people. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
The truly αμεταπειστοι among us, the people _I_ hang out with, know these things by their proper name. Which is to say, naturally, 𒌗 and 𒆠 or, if you were even somewhat educated: 𓇹, 𓇾 and 𓇳 (praise be to Ra, the Great Unborn).
Before I go and burn through my Pro tokens in four minutes again (looking at you, Argon): is this something usable with a mere Pro account? Or will this require Ultimate for agy?
"Gemini 4 Hydrogen" shows up as something I can select in antigravity CLI, while "Gemini 4 Carbon" is "Unavailable · Gemini 4 Carbon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers."
Also 3.8 flash is still visible for me (contrary to what a previous poster experienced.)
hear me out, finance: two hydrogens, but we call one carbon and allow it to do five more things than hydrogen can. and you can't do the pair-bonded mode for less than $100. by golly it just might work
Amen, what the heck—after double-tapping to zoom and center the text on this page in Safari, scrolling down with a 2-finger touch gesture...also scrolls to the left? I struggle to understand how or why one would ever mess with such behavior.
Terrible naming, unless the atomic weight is some indication of size? When is Uranium-235 coming out? Not sure what this model is, is Hydrogen like Sonnet where Carbon is like Opus?
Is google playing chemistry? First they launch Carbon, then hydrogen now next will be oxygen. Are they making models around periodic table of elements?
I'm so confused by their new naming scheme. What was wrong with number and pro/flash/flash lite.
gemini argon carbon hydrogen antigravity orchestrator pro flash flash-lite
Really
seriously... S / M / L why does everything have to be a branding/marketing exercise?
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
> There were so many memes about “Gemini Hydrogen” after they released Carbon
Is Carbon actually released yet?
yes, it was made available on November 10
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
Now what about their other Carbon the language?
This is essentially what Anthropic does with the advisor mode and what GitHub does with their multi-model pipeline using the HydraFusion model, which is just a large set of different models with different qualities used in a pipeline to produce an answer.
What I don't understand is how they all make it work with caching in general. Looking at how the advisor mode in claude work you seem to only be billed the output tokens and cache hit on the whole session when it calls out to the advisor, making it super cheap compared to running the more expensive model for the entire session.
Pretty sure on advisor it needs to send the entire context to another model. The cost is mitigated a bit because there would be few output tokens from the advisor model normally.
Orchestrator seems to automatically delegate things to subagents as required is my read of it. This should be fine for caching.
I've found hydrafusion to be great, although it sometimes does an unnecessary review pass at the end for simple tasks too.
Excellent mode! I don't have to constantly switch between models and efforts.
I'm really curious how folks feel about this. I regularly use subagents, but typically make my primary implementation agent use Carbon (or equivalent).
I set up my subagents with specific models based on how complex I believe the problem space is. I'm nervous to delegate that authority to a model (since models tend to be... optimistic about their capabilities.)
That said, not every coding task is a difficult coding task. Plenty are boilerplate, plumbing, or simple test authoring that could use a flash model, so maybe this would downgrade nicely.
On the other hand, it's trivial for me to set up some guidelines to create different subagents for different task domains, and just pin those models to those tasks -- implementor (hard) and implementor (easy) or whatever.
The only reason to do this is to save usage on the subscription. but because the value for money is so terrible in antigravity, you’re better off just using Claude Opus or GPT Sol for everything.
I’m glad Google is kinda back, but today there’s no reason to code with Gemini.
FWIW I've found the complete opposite to be true, and have gone claude->chatgpt->gemini over the past few months.
Why?
Im slowly migrating more of my work to Gemini too, Gemini is a workhorse now, 1M context is huge and their reasoning took a huge leap with Argon. I'm not in software, I'm in physical engineering, and where Claude is unpredictable w.r.t. engineering risk, Gemini is steady, measured. That's been my perception, anyway.
My qualitative take to support this is that Gemini seems to have the strongest spatial reasoning that translates nicely into CAD and engineering domain challenges. Less clear, but I also suspect a better world understanding of materials and their interactions in an intuitive way. I have this sense that Claude can tell me everything there is to know about how to spec a gasket, but it’s like Gemini actually knows what a gasket feels like and can intuit what it’s going to do.
My partner runs an internal computational mechanics benchmark that hasn’t tracked progress with model advancements (flat/no progress since early 2026) until suddenly saturating from argon and carbon. My take is that it’s due to spatial reasoning (most of the challenges are programming that require a lot of shape rotation type thinking), but we don’t know just yet why Gemini is doing so much better.
Any sources to back this up?
Carbon is the first "better than meh" model form Google in more than half a year. It's been out for less than a week. How can you consider it "steady"? Their subscription and even the API has been terribly unstable throughout the past few days, so I'm having really trouble believing any of this.
what source could their possibly be? Argon has been out for a while now and has been solid. Even flash 3.8 is great as long as you check it's work on more complex tasks, and doesn't need 12 hours to chew through problems like claude does.
I use argon and opus daily and I can tell you I have to use opus to review argon because argon goes and build things and also creates bunch of bugs along with it. I wish it weren't but that's the reality. It's great with deep cross inspection better than claude but it's slow and still need review by another frontier model.
Whatever they thought of when they said "measured"? Is that too much to ask?
Ok, you're either a troll or you objectively don't know what you're talking about. Google should be ashamed they even released 3.8 Flash. They published models with such high frequency and always made a huge jump on benchmarks. Then they were caught, when a new version of AA came out and their numbers dropped like a stone.
https://maxxbench.unlap.ai/
Glad you found what works for you but before Carbon, Gemini models have been utter garbage for more than 6 months now. I'm happy to debate anyone on this. Even DeepMind engineers agreed with this.
Gemini 3.8 Flash is the most benchmaxxed model to date and even Argon hallucinated so much, it was impossible to use it for any professional work.
I disagree with this. Flash 3.7 and Flash 3.8 are excellent models and put (for me) Gemini back on the radar. I’ve been using them a lot since release, and still do for simple implementations and grunt work.
They’re also excellent (together with Flash-Lite) to use for consumer facing features where speed and cost matters
I've been using 3.8 Flash (and Argon and Carbon) to clean up a lot of Claude mess. But I fully agree on 3.1 Pro, it was only good for conversational stuff and some deep dives, but not for actual agent work.
I'm honestly surprised they only see 25% savings with co-trained models and special harness support. With Mjolnir bridging Opus to DeepSeek Flash over ACP we see savings of 60%.
https://blog.slopcop.com/a-cheapskates-guide-to-coding-with-...
I.e. in this context Opus is the big brains orchestrator and it delegates to DeepSeek Flash subagents?
Intriguing, I might have to try this out - I have an OpenCode Go sub for the deepseeks of the world, and a Claude sub too. Sounds like I could have the best of both worlds here.
Right, scenario 1 Opus delegates to DSF
scenario 2 DSF drives, but gets to ask Opus for advice
Whatever they've done to this webpage makes it feel slow and quite horrible to use. Just leave scrolling alone
I like the visual artifact across all the text when you scroll, very nice.
I am shocked Google let this out to the public performing like this.
No scrolling issues with safari on an old iphone.
They managed to kill swipe left/right to navigate. Scroll interactions should be behind a permission.
They had Gemini review it
> Orchestrator takes a dynamic, bidirectional approach between Carbon and Gemini 4 Hydrogen within the evolution of a single trajectory. For example, Carbon can start in a read-only phase to explore dependencies, resolve ambiguities, and build a concrete plan with explicit re-planning triggers. Hydrogen could then take over to write edits, update packages, and run tests. If Hydrogen hits friction, it would hand back to Carbon to inspect the state, repair the plan, and resume execution. This allows Orchestrator to reach near-Carbon task success while being faster and more quota-efficient. On Terminal-Bench 4.1, Orchestrator reached near-Carbon task success rates while, on average, consuming 24% less quota and completing 19% faster.
Is this now how e.g. Opus works now? I use Opus 5.5 on high for just about everything now, and my bill's not gone up (gone down actually). I had assumed under the hood it was doing this (e.g. I'm sure its not literally Opus doing the log checking / file searches). Towards Google's choice, I'm skeptical introducing a new concept (Orchestrator) for this is really necessary, when they could have just done it by default, unless its plainly lower quality than pinning Carbon.
I found when fable first came out when I switched from opus my usage actually went down. Personal theory was that since it was smarter it took fewer tokens to accomplish the same tasks.
Discussion (191 points, 121 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50471431
Not the same article, this one has orchestrator and some antigravity stuff
Indeed, all the 4/Hydrogen submissions were from different sources, but *sigh* the exact same conversation is happening here as other threads.. almost as if it's the same topic.
And I thought OpenAI’s name scheme was confusing.
I don't understand which model is supposed to be better. I think Carbon is the big model and Hydrogen the Flash equivalent? Only because of a Twitter leak though. Like I have no earthly idea based on the naming.
Carbon = bigger, Hydrogen = smaller.
Ignore all other models.
Argon is noble gas so it doesn't interact with any other models.
I guess carbon has a higher atomic number than hydrogen? It's definitely the least intuitive of all the naming schemes...
Which doesn't explain Argon which is the same cost as Carbon while being worse.
Yeah I mean it's baffling to me too. I just want them to release a Sol/Opus-tier model so I can do useful stuff with ramming into the usage limits.
because Carbon is fine tuned version
they are same base model
It's sorted by electronegativity.
I thought it was just sorted alphabetically so Argon < Carbon < Hydrogen.
There is nothing confusing about it if you're at least a little bit educated. If anything, they are the least confusing, Ant drops the ball at opus->fable. For OpenAI, it's:
Luna, means "moon", smallest.
Terra, means "earth", bigger than the moon.
Sol, means "sun", the biggest object in the solar system.
Astra, plural of the word "astrum" which means "star".
Anyone who gets confused should be embarrassed.
All of those are deducible, sure. The problem is that the pattern works only when they are all listed together. Person sees the list and can logically infer where they belong. But when I see the single model name detached from it's siblings, like "OAI releases new Terra 7.7" headline, for quite a long time I had zero idea where it belongs just from my memory. Was that a big model, a small model, a medium model - no idea. Now after a few HN topics I do remember the lineup and can place the new announce where it belongs.
Why give an OpenAI answer when the confusion is about Gemini model names? What does Luna Terra or Sol have to do with Argon, Carbon, or Hydrogen?
Because "And I thought OpenAI’s name scheme was confusing." doesn't make sense and it's a reply to that post.
LLM's really destroyed the average person's ability to read and comprehend text.
To be fair, I knew all of those words already, and it never even occured to me that these names are supposed to be compared to eachother to indicate size or something. So, at least to me, it's not that it confuses me, it just imparted no information, because a collection of astronomical names and terms doesn't automatically indicate an ordering to me, it just indicates that nerds like naming their stuff after scientific terms and concepts, sci-fi stuff, etc.
I mean, this is what numbers are for. And not only do numbers indicate ordering(without having to do a mapping through severely atrophied school science class knowledge from decades ago), they can also convey meaningful size information using the wonderful technology of units of measurement.
OpenAI model names used to be confusing. He’s not talking about Luna, Terra, sol, Astra. They improved it a lot .
I refuse to walk among you rabble. You rabid mouth-breathers. I refuse I tell you.
The only models worth _my_ time are Σεληνη, Γη, Ἡλιος and Αστρα.
I don’t know what to tell you illiterate heretics other than you should know you are bad people. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
The truly αμεταπειστοι among us, the people _I_ hang out with, know these things by their proper name. Which is to say, naturally, 𒌗 and 𒆠 or, if you were even somewhat educated: 𓇹, 𓇾 and 𓇳 (praise be to Ra, the Great Unborn).
It saddens me to see HN has fallen to this level.
Can you guys stop taking the road signs off of your buildings when you paint please? It’s already hard enough to drive there.
I have no idea what's going on with Gemini naming. Maybe it's an inside joke or something.
Before I go and burn through my Pro tokens in four minutes again (looking at you, Argon): is this something usable with a mere Pro account? Or will this require Ultimate for agy?
It's in Google Workspace as well. I'm on the enterprise workspace tier. So I'm not sure if that's why.
I’m on the Pro (~20$) plan, and it’s available for me, having replaced 3.8 Flash.
I have Pro and I see the new hydrogen model. But not the Orchestrator.
nope. Ultra only like any Carbon use, for now
"Gemini 4 Hydrogen" shows up as something I can select in antigravity CLI, while "Gemini 4 Carbon" is "Unavailable · Gemini 4 Carbon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers."
Also 3.8 flash is still visible for me (contrary to what a previous poster experienced.)
I have the "Google AI Pro" plan.
hear me out, finance: two hydrogens, but we call one carbon and allow it to do five more things than hydrogen can. and you can't do the pair-bonded mode for less than $100. by golly it just might work
Are there still some web devs (or LLMs with "rockstar front-end developer" prompts) which think it's ok to override native scroll behavior?
ps. it's freaking not
Amen, what the heck—after double-tapping to zoom and center the text on this page in Safari, scrolling down with a 2-finger touch gesture...also scrolls to the left? I struggle to understand how or why one would ever mess with such behavior.
Terrible naming, unless the atomic weight is some indication of size? When is Uranium-235 coming out? Not sure what this model is, is Hydrogen like Sonnet where Carbon is like Opus?
Thing is Carbon should be in the middle by this logic. But no - it is their heavyweight model.
How did they fuck scrolling up on a page like this
Is google playing chemistry? First they launch Carbon, then hydrogen now next will be oxygen. Are they making models around periodic table of elements?
Sundar did say we'd periodically release new models.
I accept this dadjoke