Announced the model two weeks ago to a ton of hype, model was unavailable for anyone to try. On twitter, Google folks went on a great run taking shots at Muse ("Muse who?"). The hype died down bc nobody could touch the models and meta/muse came out with a similarly capable model in the meanwhile.
At the same time, OpenAI had a disastrous dev day that led a lot of users to jump ship to Claude.
Couple weeks later, Gemini-4-argon is still unavailable on anything less than the ultra tier, which means there's no natural funnel to get ppl to pay for the more expensive ultra plan other than "trust us the model is good".
If Google had argon broadly available earlier this month they would have picked up a ton of new users.
As someone internal at Google I don't understand why there's so much criticism of Google models... but right now I'm using the next model beyond Argon, and Flash 3.8. In my personal Gemini app I only have access to 3.5.
Models move so fast now and Google is very cautious about releasing them.
My complaint, and the complaint of many is not the models - they can be good to very good depending on use case.
What sucks, hard, is googles ability to deploy direct to devs and customers at scale when the deployment is not a longstanding Google project.
Case in point: I’m an ultra subscriber and see in my app right now an ad to try Gemini 4; meanwhile the only models I have available are 3.1 pro,3.6 flash, and 3.8 thinking.
Clicking the try gemini 4 link takes me to a demo prompt that loads 3.6 flash. Srsly
I won’t even start telling you what getting api key based access together was like a year ago.
I think google makes great models, my favorite models have been google models. My critisisms are with the infrastructure around the models (or lack of them),things like billing, access, changes to terms and limits, pricing etc. All of these have shown either inconsistency, lack of care, sometimes confusing offerings, and things that felt like rug pulls.
Please google, just make it easy for me to give you money and get what I paid for.
Because Google models are crap. They are on par with local shit models. Last time I tried they were unable to even hold a longer conversation, because they would enter loop and reiterate last answer regardless of the prompt etc.
Then basic mistakes (inferring wrong information from the given text, hallucinations...). Gemini is okay for some absolute basics and the rest of the work goes to actual frontier models.
All the power users are always jumping around by now and many hold the smallest subscription with all the models or at least two.
Narrating this as if it’s the game of thrones is a fun exercise, but it’s just becoming commonplace now that models jump ahead of each other on a weekly to Monthly basis.
> and many hold the smallest subscription with all the models or at least two
This was part of the issue, as stated in their comment. We couldn't jump around to try it for the reason that is wasn't made available to, as you say, "all the power users".
I'm still a codex man myself but lots of people feel like opus 5.5 just gets it for some projects in a way that astra doesn't. Especially given the fact that astra and sol 6.1 are often at capacity late at night during US hours, when lots of people want to run longer unsupervised projects while they sleep. There's a general sense I've felt reaching some comment threads that openai failed to react with something better than opus 5.5 and are rushing to release small tweaks to make people feel like they're still getting something new.
Gemini 4 is announced be available to Pro users in the Gemini app.
I mean, I heard rumors too that it would be ultra only, but that doesn't seem to be the case, unless you are specifically talking about antigravity?
Realistically, market adoption isn't going to be the result of terminally online people (like me, I confess) following things way too closely on social.
There weren't "rumors" that it would be Ultra only, that's what Google has announced two weeks ago. Happy to see they've went back on that, but I haven't seen Gemini 4 on any apps till now, and I'm a Google AI Pro subscriber.
edit: just a few hours after this comment I got access to Gemini 4 on the Gemini app. Yayy! :)
Pulled astra 6.1 at the last moment (allegedly) and only released a dirty looper sol 6.1. Also released dots which are unavailable in EU. There may have been more but no one cared.
Announced the model two weeks ago to a ton of hype, model was unavailable for anyone to try. On twitter, Google folks went on a great run taking shots at Muse ("Muse who?"). The hype died down bc nobody could touch the models and meta/muse came out with a similarly capable model in the meanwhile.
At the same time, OpenAI had a disastrous dev day that led a lot of users to jump ship to Claude.
Couple weeks later, Gemini-4-argon is still unavailable on anything less than the ultra tier, which means there's no natural funnel to get ppl to pay for the more expensive ultra plan other than "trust us the model is good".
If Google had argon broadly available earlier this month they would have picked up a ton of new users.
As someone internal at Google I don't understand why there's so much criticism of Google models... but right now I'm using the next model beyond Argon, and Flash 3.8. In my personal Gemini app I only have access to 3.5.
Models move so fast now and Google is very cautious about releasing them.
My complaint, and the complaint of many is not the models - they can be good to very good depending on use case.
What sucks, hard, is googles ability to deploy direct to devs and customers at scale when the deployment is not a longstanding Google project.
Case in point: I’m an ultra subscriber and see in my app right now an ad to try Gemini 4; meanwhile the only models I have available are 3.1 pro,3.6 flash, and 3.8 thinking.
Clicking the try gemini 4 link takes me to a demo prompt that loads 3.6 flash. Srsly
I won’t even start telling you what getting api key based access together was like a year ago.
1 reply →
I think google makes great models, my favorite models have been google models. My critisisms are with the infrastructure around the models (or lack of them),things like billing, access, changes to terms and limits, pricing etc. All of these have shown either inconsistency, lack of care, sometimes confusing offerings, and things that felt like rug pulls.
Please google, just make it easy for me to give you money and get what I paid for.
People have very short attention spans and cheerlead whoever is winning at any particular point in time.
For agentic coding, Claude Code with the latest Fable or Opus is still just better. That's what people care most about.
Unless Gemini CLI greatly improves and Argon works well in it, this probably won't make a dent in the coding market.
"I don't understand why people don't like our models but we can't get our act together on the products they use those models in"
7 replies →
Because Google models are crap. They are on par with local shit models. Last time I tried they were unable to even hold a longer conversation, because they would enter loop and reiterate last answer regardless of the prompt etc.
Then basic mistakes (inferring wrong information from the given text, hallucinations...). Gemini is okay for some absolute basics and the rest of the work goes to actual frontier models.
1 reply →
All the power users are always jumping around by now and many hold the smallest subscription with all the models or at least two.
Narrating this as if it’s the game of thrones is a fun exercise, but it’s just becoming commonplace now that models jump ahead of each other on a weekly to Monthly basis.
> and many hold the smallest subscription with all the models or at least two
This was part of the issue, as stated in their comment. We couldn't jump around to try it for the reason that is wasn't made available to, as you say, "all the power users".
You're not convincing me. The war for compute within google is well known by now. Every single product decision stems from that.
Do you really think people in google are happy about how long it took to release this model?
1 reply →
Why did people jump to Claude? I redirected company resources to OpenAI Pro 500 accounts and away from Anthropic for most use.
We’re all running on Astra medium the whole week and loving it.
I’m curious what I missed.
I'm still a codex man myself but lots of people feel like opus 5.5 just gets it for some projects in a way that astra doesn't. Especially given the fact that astra and sol 6.1 are often at capacity late at night during US hours, when lots of people want to run longer unsupervised projects while they sleep. There's a general sense I've felt reaching some comment threads that openai failed to react with something better than opus 5.5 and are rushing to release small tweaks to make people feel like they're still getting something new.
8 replies →
Just for the record, I'm a Spanish user with Google AI pro (€20 per month or so) and my app has Argon now. (Yay!)
What about Antigravity? I don't get Argon 4 in that.
"model was unavailable for anyone to try"
Oh yeah. Completely forgot about that. Big headlines and big claims, but no one could actually use it and report on it.
Does seem like they don't quite grasp how the hype train operates. Or maybe they don't care as much.
Gemini 4 is announced be available to Pro users in the Gemini app.
I mean, I heard rumors too that it would be ultra only, but that doesn't seem to be the case, unless you are specifically talking about antigravity?
Realistically, market adoption isn't going to be the result of terminally online people (like me, I confess) following things way too closely on social.
There weren't "rumors" that it would be Ultra only, that's what Google has announced two weeks ago. Happy to see they've went back on that, but I haven't seen Gemini 4 on any apps till now, and I'm a Google AI Pro subscriber.
edit: just a few hours after this comment I got access to Gemini 4 on the Gemini app. Yayy! :)
2 replies →
am on pro. updated my apps. no g4. sadge google.
2 replies →
> At the same time, OpenAI had a disastrous dev day that led a lot of users to jump ship to Claude.
Can you elaborate on this?
There was some backlash around the pricing changes - the $200/month tier offers less usage now, at the same time as the launch of the $500/month tier.
Reddit thread with 247 comments here: https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1wtgv3z/dev_day_l/
Aside from that I'm not sure what was "disastrous" - maybe the lack of a new model release to compete with the just-released Claude Opus 5.5?
2 replies →
Pulled astra 6.1 at the last moment (allegedly) and only released a dirty looper sol 6.1. Also released dots which are unavailable in EU. There may have been more but no one cared.
1 reply →