Gemini 4 Argon is a real Astra and Opus rival, but Google's harness lags, early tester says
A tester with two weeks of access says Argon is not just benchmark-tuned, matching SOTA in games, SVG and 3D at $2/$10 pricing, though Google's harness and sign-in experience hold it back.
gemini 4 argon is out. i've had access for a couple of weeks and google are back. kind of… unlike muse, the model isn't simply benchmaxed, it's a genuine contender to astra and opus. it made games, svgs, 3d modelling that matched sota, but other accounts will cover this im sure. and $2/$10 per million tokens till end of november is mad. the glaring issue is the culture at google and the harness. their grokbot rival spark is severely lacking: > can't handle sign ins, so no x, reddit or youtube > the cloud computer is clunky > can't easily browse the files it's made > 40 partner apps but locked out of everything else > no idea which model it's actually using or if it's dropped to flash > you can't even get multiple gmails signed in ffs they desperately need a dots competitor or something that rivals the way anthropic are implementing their version. google say the writing is better. maybe vs old gemini but it's not in the same league as astra and opus, and memory is way behind. i'm hopeful someone comes in and cuts through the red tape, because the hard part is training a frontier model this strong, everything else is on the table for them. anyone found a way round the sign ins? ps. i should make it very clear that i fully expect google to catch up with dots and have a sota harness. it’s now unclear to me who wins this arms race between google, openai and anthropic.