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".
This sounds an awful lot like Yahoo not needing to compete with Google on search because they have the most valuable "web property".
ChatGPT and Google compete in the same market: a text box that answers your questions. The text box provider who can best answer the most difficult questions always wins because users don't care who they ask their easy questions to. Being a low-end text box provider is not a business model: providers either compete at the high-end or die.
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.
Argon is slow but surprisingly my progress is noticeably faster. If you aren’t prompting extra ambitiously with top tier models, you should probably just use deep seek.
Not quite at the build me a whole app level but you need to definitely zoom out a few times and prompt from either a feature set or many overlapping details at once.
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
Seems like a completely fair and normal business practice to do a gradual roll-out first to trusted testers, then to Ultra, maybe to Pro later. Not sure why Plus and free users feel so aggrieved that they can't free-ride with those paying $200/month.
There is something to be said about the fact that Google tomorrow could release the greatest performing, most efficient, comprehensively capable LLM of all times and even if you are a paying customer of theirs, you could not access it across their interfaces. Not even going to mention the announcement to release delay, which given the numbers don't seem to have changed, I cannot comprehend why they'd do.
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.
When I switched from the Pro to the Plus subscription, they did not state anything to that effect. I expected a smaller quota of their most recent flash models, and instead I got models that are so old they are useless to me, so I canceled the subscription.
It is the lack of transparency that gets me. With PAYG open-weight models, I know exactly what I get for my money.
To put a firm number on this, I went through 40% of my Argon quota with three small projects: update a cartogram with the daily election data from the California Secretary of State; read a bunch of campaign filing PDFs, property tax bills, and business registrations to create a graph of related individuals; and write an optimizer that snaps GTFS transit route shapes to where the roads actually are.
I'm getting this quota for free from Google Fi so it seems like a square deal to me. But running out of quota mid-project can be irritating.
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... ;-)
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 want to believe they want to slowly divert revenues to cloud by selling compute to frontier labs. Therefore they are intentionally reducing usage. But a simpler explanation is incompetence
I was benchmarking 3.6-3.8 and it seems like they just tuned thinking levels to have higher token consumption. For example 3.6 medium was equivalent to 3.7 low. Your comment seems to support that
I got ai plus just before discovering gemini 4 is not included in the plan, of course it's not useful for me lol (I'm quite sure this was advertised, but not like, big characters saying you won't have access to the best models, just somewhere where it mixes with other things). Good thing I got it for free as a student
This is the problem. Google was ahead for a brief period where this model was unreleased. Since yesterday that is no longer the case. And what’s worse, it’s much easier to access fable vs carbon with the various plan offerings from the respective providers. I hope Google understands the urgency here and why it’s important to get their models out, if they want the accolades and user traction that comes with being at the frontier. I’d love for a much more competitive ai landscape and I’d love if Google could help make that happen.
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."
I use both. I've been very impressed with Argon High on the $20 plan so I just upgraded to the $100 plan to try Carbon. On Argon high, on a 4 hour flight, I was able to build a pipeline to help us train a decision model off qwen3.5-9b and integrate the new flow into a rather complex codebase we have. I had previously tried with Opus 5.5 and was never happy enough with the output to productionalize it.
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.
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.
My personal "AI Pro" Gemini has 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.8 Flash, 3.1 Pro, 4 Argon.
Pretty inconsistent.
ChatGPT and Google compete in the same market: a text box that answers your questions. The text box provider who can best answer the most difficult questions always wins because users don't care who they ask their easy questions to. Being a low-end text box provider is not a business model: providers either compete at the high-end or die.
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.
Not quite at the build me a whole app level but you need to definitely zoom out a few times and prompt from either a feature set or many overlapping details at once.
Is the issue that consumers get it sooner or is the roll out random or locked to some other factor?
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.
Immensely more expensive than a sub.
It is the lack of transparency that gets me. With PAYG open-weight models, I know exactly what I get for my money.
I'm getting this quota for free from Google Fi so it seems like a square deal to me. But running out of quota mid-project can be irritating.
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'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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNbkThtNzS8
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... ;-)
https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2120198811297694192
Why not give people a taste of the good stuff with a lower quota, then you may feel more inclined to upgrade.
I wonder if they still offer cheaper non-AI Google One plans. I'd rebrand AI Plus as a storage plan with some free AI add-ons...
> 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.
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.
At my work, Argon is deemed to be too expensive, and gemini-3.8 flash is just not good enough.
Just like human beings
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 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
Well run businesses usually try to make money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)
pelicanmaxxing is here.
Amazing, can we now close this pelican benchmark and move on to different things?
Google branding strikes again
What's the recommended coding harness I should be using to test it out? (Recommended by folks here, not by Google...)
Argon was announced 30 September, publicly available 13 October. Carbon announced 28 October, publicly available 10 November.
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.