I have google AI plus because of drive storage and it’s ridiculous that the best model this gives access to is 3.6 flash, not even the latest flash model. Google either needs to stop this being branded anything “AI” or make better models available if this is what the entrance subscription gives
Just checked my Gemini app, still only have 3.1 Pro, 3.6 Flash and 3.6 Thinking on Pro. Looks like it's Ultra only.
They've been so slow to update their top models and roll them out that despite subscribing to the Gemini Pro plan, I use it so rarely that this is my last month. That and their product offering was so confusing I basically gave up.
I say the same thing on every thread. For 23e a month on ChatGPT I get access to the top models, almost always day one. I might not get a huge amount of usage but I get to use the flagship and try things out. On AI plus for the same price I get basically nothing, and models that are 6-9 months old. I don't understand why google is not using their size and leverage to get these models into consumers, with a useful harness and take market share.
It's not their business. Anthropic and OpenAI don't have millions of phones in the wild blasting the ever-loving hell out of Luna or Haiku to create timers and search contacts. They probably made Carbon just to help distill the next Gemini Flash. They are fine letting a _few_ people use it, maybe, but I bet they are also fine if no one does. Worst case for them is probably a bunch of $20 subs building things with their top model and taking compute away from Pixel 11 calendar searches or google.com "summaries".
When's the last time you checked what is offered by the plus subscription? It's been a while now that it's the equivalent to ChatGPT Go (on price and offer), giving only increased limits but no difference in model access compared to free.
I pay for Ultra and have been using Argon for a couple weeks. I just checked in both Agy and Gemini and Carbon is there for me now, too. I'll try it, but Argon is itself already so slow that I'm not sure Carbon will make sense for most activities.
On pro here and I can do about 2 design tasks a week before I hit usage limits with Argon. The usage limit with carbon is probably gone just loading the context.
I've been using Argon (Medium) pretty heavily the past couple of weeks to create a website and an app and am not coming close to my Ultra limits. I've used High for a couple of code reviews and security audits.
I'm not sure if I'm a sucker for paying $100/mo for this, and Google's harnesses are so underwhelming compared to Claude Code, but I'm not having a bad experience. Compared to the beginning of the year when Antigravity was almost unusable and Gemini Pro 3.1 was noticeably behind other options.
Yep, I'm on Pro as well, and Argon been hugely useful, but I get about 10 prompts with it a week. And that means that I have to use 3.8 flash for most of what I'm doing, which is obviously not a great experience for any kind of long horizon tasks.
I have Carbon in my consumer Gemini too. I have a Google drive storage upgrade that I pay for that I assume is bundled with it - it's the only thing I can think of as I've certainly not gone out of my way to do anything special to get access (and so far, it is free for me to access it this way)
In one case I had to upgrade my Antigravity GUI to see new models, I guess because of an API change.
At the same time, the CLI saw the new models without any change. Possibly that was just because my CLI install was newer than the GUI one. (Edit: oh, it's because my CLI autoupdates. Autoupdates for the GUI on Linux in an AppImage is... messy.)
Edit: But in this case:
> Gemini 4 Carbon is available via the API in Google AI Studio and Gemini for business for all paying developers and enterprises
Is it location specific? I have AI Pro plan and I have had Gemini 3.8 Flash for months, and I got Argon about two weeks ago in Antigravity, and now I also have Argon in the Gemini app.
They just took 3.1 pro away from me while I was asking about Cami Clark and Epstein (for due-dilligince), lol. Now I have access to 3.6 Flash and 3.5 flash-light. So I canceled my sub. Shame. I used to love using antigravity when the allowance was good.
To add, it's actually surprisingly good. I have this unfinished paper draft that I keep feeding to various top AI's to see what it picks up on and what suggests to edit, and while Astra/Fable/Opus/Argon so far has been mediocre, Carbon's answer surprised me with some interesting points all the other AI's missed.
It's an anecdote, sample of one, but it got my attention.
Out of curiosity, have you noticed being redirected to flash models recently?
I've not been able to get a _single_ response from Argon in over a week, no matter what or when I ask. I also usually am active later in the evening so figured this would be post peak activity anyway.
For OAI and Anthropic releases we usually get a "pelican" here in the comments pretty (suspiciously) quickly, which then also happens to be on top of the comments. I always found that pretty weird given that's not an actual model "evaluation". It's provocative and gets the people going, I guess.
This happens not so much when Google or other labs release (not even on the Argon release post, afaik). Make of that what you will. Not sure if Google is sending a nod or a wink... ;-)
Looks like it's the same price as Argon on openrouter, which is good to see. Probably was announced already somewhere that I missed.
It's interesting that Opencode Go got Argon, I'm hoping they'll get Carbon as well. They claim that Argon is ZDR on their platform. That's surprising to me because openrouter doesn't have ZDR endpoints for Google's models any more, due to a change in policy.
Deepseek is good enough for me that I use it for everything cost sensitive. I tend to switch to Google's models for world knowledge, planning, and complicated bugs that Deepseek gets stuck on. Argon is also a great writer in my experience, hopefully Carbon is the same. Seems like RL for code generation ruins most model's communication abilities. V4.1 Flash 1017 is a significant step back from the previous Deepseek model in that respect, despite being a noticeably better coder.
What’s the difference between /boost, /teamwork, and now /swarm?
Anecdotally with Argon it would cut corners when attempting to one shot complicated prompts. Adversarial review would find hardcoded hacks and even bugs in physics code.
/teamwork did help with that but made it take EVEN LONGER
I’m hoping Carbon (with /swarm?) is going to help me with my physics and engineering. I don’t like having to cross check with Claude or Sol just to trust the results.
I had some reasonable success running teamwork with argon orchestrator, 3.8 Flash implementor subagents, and follow up Argon/flash subagents running uno-reverse skill, mixed up with /goal
With Plus subscription this is in the list of available models, but says: "Unavailable - Gemini 4 Carbon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers."
Just want to say I find Carbon waaay better than Argon.
I keep noticing google model sumbissions on hackernews getting targetted by systematically negative comments.
> Using Google Antigravity’s /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game where you explore Google’s Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike
> Using Google Antigravity’s /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game where you explore Google’s Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike — coordinating subagents to model 3D assets in Blender from Omni and Nano Banana references, build the browser game in Three.js with WebGL shaders, and pair procedural Web Audio sound effects with Lyria music.[1]
Amazing, can we now close this pelican benchmark and move on to different things?
Google makes it really hard to try their models.
Guys, let me try it on pro or whatever sub. If I like it I will pay you more. I am already paying Anthropic 600 bucks a month and will pay more the moment they offer higher tier sub (I have 3x Ultra now) but I downgraded my Google sub because it's just so hard to try anything from them and it takes forever from the announcement to land in the app.
Seems like as soon as there is any post about Gemini there are knee jerk reactions about how either you can't use it because it's not released (you can - it is released), you can't use it because you can't buy it (you can - consumer plans or API or just even OpenRouter), or that it hallucinates worse than other models (not according to https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience that actually says it is SOTA in this regard).
I've used 3.8 flash a lot as my daily driver (...eagerly awaiting flash 4 or whatever it ends up getting called Zirconium or Caesium or something other nonsense I am sure) and I can't say I've noticed any significant hallucination issues that everyone seems to think are so prevalent.
I have google AI plus because of drive storage and it’s ridiculous that the best model this gives access to is 3.6 flash, not even the latest flash model. Google either needs to stop this being branded anything “AI” or make better models available if this is what the entrance subscription gives
I don't understand why they do this
Why not give people a taste of the good stuff with a lower quota, then you may feel more inclined to upgrade.
Just checked my Gemini app, still only have 3.1 Pro, 3.6 Flash and 3.6 Thinking on Pro. Looks like it's Ultra only.
They've been so slow to update their top models and roll them out that despite subscribing to the Gemini Pro plan, I use it so rarely that this is my last month. That and their product offering was so confusing I basically gave up.
I say the same thing on every thread. For 23e a month on ChatGPT I get access to the top models, almost always day one. I might not get a huge amount of usage but I get to use the flagship and try things out. On AI plus for the same price I get basically nothing, and models that are 6-9 months old. I don't understand why google is not using their size and leverage to get these models into consumers, with a useful harness and take market share.
It's not their business. Anthropic and OpenAI don't have millions of phones in the wild blasting the ever-loving hell out of Luna or Haiku to create timers and search contacts. They probably made Carbon just to help distill the next Gemini Flash. They are fine letting a _few_ people use it, maybe, but I bet they are also fine if no one does. Worst case for them is probably a bunch of $20 subs building things with their top model and taking compute away from Pixel 11 calendar searches or google.com "summaries".
My Google Workspace Gemini (with "AI Expanded Access") has 3.6 Flash, 3.8 Thinking, 4 Carbon.
My personal "AI Pro" Gemini has 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.8 Flash, 3.1 Pro, 4 Argon.
Pretty inconsistent.
This is the GoogleWay
Same. On PLUS subscription. One of those situations where you really want a human to talk to..
When's the last time you checked what is offered by the plus subscription? It's been a while now that it's the equivalent to ChatGPT Go (on price and offer), giving only increased limits but no difference in model access compared to free.
I pay for Ultra and have been using Argon for a couple weeks. I just checked in both Agy and Gemini and Carbon is there for me now, too. I'll try it, but Argon is itself already so slow that I'm not sure Carbon will make sense for most activities.
On pro here and I can do about 2 design tasks a week before I hit usage limits with Argon. The usage limit with carbon is probably gone just loading the context.
I've been using Argon (Medium) pretty heavily the past couple of weeks to create a website and an app and am not coming close to my Ultra limits. I've used High for a couple of code reviews and security audits.
I'm not sure if I'm a sucker for paying $100/mo for this, and Google's harnesses are so underwhelming compared to Claude Code, but I'm not having a bad experience. Compared to the beginning of the year when Antigravity was almost unusable and Gemini Pro 3.1 was noticeably behind other options.
Yep, I'm on Pro as well, and Argon been hugely useful, but I get about 10 prompts with it a week. And that means that I have to use 3.8 flash for most of what I'm doing, which is obviously not a great experience for any kind of long horizon tasks.
I wonder why my consumer Gemini app has Argon and 3.8 flash with a pro plan but so many people here don't have that.
Is the issue that consumers get it sooner or is the roll out random or locked to some other factor?
I have Carbon in my consumer Gemini too. I have a Google drive storage upgrade that I pay for that I assume is bundled with it - it's the only thing I can think of as I've certainly not gone out of my way to do anything special to get access (and so far, it is free for me to access it this way)
In one case I had to upgrade my Antigravity GUI to see new models, I guess because of an API change.
At the same time, the CLI saw the new models without any change. Possibly that was just because my CLI install was newer than the GUI one. (Edit: oh, it's because my CLI autoupdates. Autoupdates for the GUI on Linux in an AppImage is... messy.)
Edit: But in this case:
> Gemini 4 Carbon is available via the API in Google AI Studio and Gemini for business for all paying developers and enterprises
I.e. Seems to be API only right now.
I found out when I opened Gemini app on phone and it showed Carbon Medium as default
Is it location specific? I have AI Pro plan and I have had Gemini 3.8 Flash for months, and I got Argon about two weeks ago in Antigravity, and now I also have Argon in the Gemini app.
considering how little you can use argon with pro, i guess carbon will be the same so why do you care?
They just took 3.1 pro away from me while I was asking about Cami Clark and Epstein (for due-dilligince), lol. Now I have access to 3.6 Flash and 3.5 flash-light. So I canceled my sub. Shame. I used to love using antigravity when the allowance was good.
Available through the API.
To add, it's actually surprisingly good. I have this unfinished paper draft that I keep feeding to various top AI's to see what it picks up on and what suggests to edit, and while Astra/Fable/Opus/Argon so far has been mediocre, Carbon's answer surprised me with some interesting points all the other AI's missed.
It's an anecdote, sample of one, but it got my attention.
I haven't tried Carbon yet, but Argon has been my favorite for asking questions or doing research on something I'm working on.
Out of curiosity, have you noticed being redirected to flash models recently?
I've not been able to get a _single_ response from Argon in over a week, no matter what or when I ask. I also usually am active later in the evening so figured this would be post peak activity anyway.
A nice nod to simonw in one of the highlight videos;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNbkThtNzS8
For OAI and Anthropic releases we usually get a "pelican" here in the comments pretty (suspiciously) quickly, which then also happens to be on top of the comments. I always found that pretty weird given that's not an actual model "evaluation". It's provocative and gets the people going, I guess.
This happens not so much when Google or other labs release (not even on the Argon release post, afaik). Make of that what you will. Not sure if Google is sending a nod or a wink... ;-)
That's awesome. Will models be pelican-maxed from now on?
Obviously. The next step after pelican-maxxing is AGI.
If this is not the end game when it comes to bike riding pelicans, I guess we are close enough. :-)
Looks like it's the same price as Argon on openrouter, which is good to see. Probably was announced already somewhere that I missed.
It's interesting that Opencode Go got Argon, I'm hoping they'll get Carbon as well. They claim that Argon is ZDR on their platform. That's surprising to me because openrouter doesn't have ZDR endpoints for Google's models any more, due to a change in policy.
I wish they would either reduce the price of Argon, or provide a "weaker" model at a decent price.
At my work, Argon is deemed to be too expensive, and gemini-3.8 flash is just not good enough.
Deepseek is good enough for me that I use it for everything cost sensitive. I tend to switch to Google's models for world knowledge, planning, and complicated bugs that Deepseek gets stuck on. Argon is also a great writer in my experience, hopefully Carbon is the same. Seems like RL for code generation ruins most model's communication abilities. V4.1 Flash 1017 is a significant step back from the previous Deepseek model in that respect, despite being a noticeably better coder.
> Seems like RL for code generation ruins most model's communication abilities.
Just like human beings
Is it 100$ a month for the minimum plan that has access
Yes.
> It is also rolling out to all Google AI Ultra subscribers
However for what its worth the $20 plan got Argon like a day or so later.
Yes, and it worked for a chat query or two. Then 5 hour wait.
What’s the difference between /boost, /teamwork, and now /swarm?
Anecdotally with Argon it would cut corners when attempting to one shot complicated prompts. Adversarial review would find hardcoded hacks and even bugs in physics code.
/teamwork did help with that but made it take EVEN LONGER
I’m hoping Carbon (with /swarm?) is going to help me with my physics and engineering. I don’t like having to cross check with Claude or Sol just to trust the results.
I had some reasonable success running teamwork with argon orchestrator, 3.8 Flash implementor subagents, and follow up Argon/flash subagents running uno-reverse skill, mixed up with /goal
The documentation on swarm has a short comparison with the other options: https://antigravity.google/docs/swarm
I needed something to switch the account where the usage is taken from, not the configuration.
I made something simple & transparent named Switcheroo: https://github.com/FTCHD/switcheroo
Works with other AI CLIs like Gemini, and other various CLIs like Vercel (if you're managing multiple accounts like me), Netlify, Github etc
Does it work with antigravity?
Is gemini ever worth switching to from an anthropic plan? I feel like Anthropic is still pretty comfortably in front.
I use both, if you're heavily multimodal or need slightly stronger writing it can be worth it
Is this an intentional naming clash with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(programming_language)?
Maybe a stark reminder about growing data centre carbon emissions?
It wasn't enough for them to clash with Go!, now they're clashing internally?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)
I see it in my Cursor Enterprise plan.
It uses more tokens than Argon? I already get very little out of my Pro subscription (using Antigravity) with Argon.
Yeah, I was barely able to complete a single project with Ultra 5x using Carbon...
With Plus subscription this is in the list of available models, but says: "Unavailable - Gemini 4 Carbon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers."
Just want to say I find Carbon waaay better than Argon. I keep noticing google model sumbissions on hackernews getting targetted by systematically negative comments.
We have an enterprise account and we can’t use this. What do you want us to say? Rollout has been incredible?
> Using Google Antigravity’s /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game where you explore Google’s Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike
pelicanmaxxing is here.
> Using Google Antigravity’s /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game where you explore Google’s Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike — coordinating subagents to model 3D assets in Blender from Omni and Nano Banana references, build the browser game in Three.js with WebGL shaders, and pair procedural Web Audio sound effects with Lyria music.[1]
Amazing, can we now close this pelican benchmark and move on to different things?
Carbon and Argon are such similar names this is the first time I've registered they are different models.
Google branding strikes again
Compared to Sol/Luna/Terra or Opus 5.5 being better than Fable, the true test for AGI is a good consistent and clear naming scheme
Maybe they had insider knowledge that anthropic was about to release fable 5.2? The timing is a bit too convenient.
That was faster than the previous announcement -> release cycles, right?
What's the recommended coding harness I should be using to test it out? (Recommended by folks here, not by Google...)
No, just like Argon it was released 14 days after the announcement.
Argon was announced 30 September, publicly available 13 October. Carbon announced 28 October, publicly available 10 November.
Surely it should be antigravity?
This has been available in AI studio via api for a while now.
Google makes it really hard to try their models. Guys, let me try it on pro or whatever sub. If I like it I will pay you more. I am already paying Anthropic 600 bucks a month and will pay more the moment they offer higher tier sub (I have 3x Ultra now) but I downgraded my Google sub because it's just so hard to try anything from them and it takes forever from the announcement to land in the app.
Still don't see it!
Gemini vis-a-vis Claude and GPT seems to have substantial unsolved hallucination problems. Hope it’s solved or it can’t be used for agentic coding.
People keep saying this, yet the benchmarks suggest it is actually the best at not hallucinating? https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience
Seems like as soon as there is any post about Gemini there are knee jerk reactions about how either you can't use it because it's not released (you can - it is released), you can't use it because you can't buy it (you can - consumer plans or API or just even OpenRouter), or that it hallucinates worse than other models (not according to https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience that actually says it is SOTA in this regard).
I've used 3.8 flash a lot as my daily driver (...eagerly awaiting flash 4 or whatever it ends up getting called Zirconium or Caesium or something other nonsense I am sure) and I can't say I've noticed any significant hallucination issues that everyone seems to think are so prevalent.
Maybe add (2026)?