Gemini 4 Carbon is now available

meetpateltech 282 points 154 comments November 10, 2026
blog.google · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

gimlichgu

Maybe add (2026)?

nothercastle

Is it 100$ a month for the minimum plan that has access

guidopallemans

A nice nod to simonw in one of the highlight videos; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNbkThtNzS8

byefruit

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.

jgbuddy

Still don't see it!

spider-mario

> 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.

5555watch

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.

doctoboggan

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...)

lisenKaci

This has been available in AI studio via api for a while now.

bscphil

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.

cyrusmg

With Plus subscription this is in the list of available models, but says: "Unavailable - Gemini 4 Carbon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers."

tuskie

Is this an intentional naming clash with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(programming_language) ?

drivebyhooting

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.

ftchd

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

Latitude7973

It uses more tokens than Argon? I already get very little out of my Pro subscription (using Antigravity) with Argon.

catigula

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.

boodleboodle

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.

FacelessJim

Maybe they had insider knowledge that anthropic was about to release fable 5.2? The timing is a bit too convenient.

hmokiguess

> 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?

bluecalm

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.

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