Gemini 4 Hydrogen

ElProlactin

With all the names for their AI offerings, I need to come up for Oxygen.

vatsachak

This is the most important class of models to keep watch. These are the ones that are going be to workhorses in the post-tokenmaxxing clarity

tintor

When are getting more powerful Gemini 4 Lead, and Gemini 4 Uranium models?

james2doyle

Their naming scheme seems a bit tough to follow. But it does seem like they finally learned their lesson and announced something at the same time it's actually available!

hodder

Maybe I'm not on the latest models (I do actually pay the min plan), but just this week I tried Gemini again. It still doesn't even get the current date/time of day correct. If it cant do that, I cant trust any output from it. I have no idea how Google fumbled so badly, but benchmark scores don't mean a thing if you cant even get your LLM to output the current date and time correctly. You could vibe code a better LLM with Fable than what they have delivered. It is embarassing.

sergiotapia

Aren't Google leaders embarrassed that the first thing I think of when I see their models drop is: I will see if I can call it from openrouter? Why are there 7 different ways to call this model from Google? Which one should I use? Is no one at the wheel calling the shots at Google and it's a PIP every man for himself? I want to try them out, don't know how.

thereitgoes456

Is this a replacement for Flash-Lite? Because it’s being used to serve answers for Search. The new naming scheme seems shockingly poor though, “Pro” and “Flash” made intuitive sense to me, and Anthropic and OpenAI kept a sense of scale. Nobody is going to intuitively understand “Oh yes, Hydrogen is smaller than Carbon”, even though it is.

JacobAsmuth

I think a new default free model for AI Mode being so close to the frontier will be a massive jump in perceived AI intelligence by the general public.

jawns

The naming of these Gemini 4 models is ridiculous. In order of sophistication and cost, the models are Hydrogen -> Argon -> Carbon. What kind of ordering is that?!? With the introduction of Hydrogen, it's no longer ordered alphabetically. That would be Argon → Carbon → Hydrogen. And it never was ordered by atomic mass, which is arguably the best ordering if you're going to name your model classes after chemical elements. That would be Hydrogen → Carbon → Argon. It's also not ordered by prevalence in the universe. That ordering would also be Hydrogen → Carbon → Argon. It's not ordered by electronegativity, boiling point, melting point, or any other remotely defensible chemical property I can think of. It's not even ordered by letter count, Scrabble score, or NFPA 704 Flammability Rating, all of which would be Argon → Carbon → Hydrogen.

prodigycorp

Google team: these names are an embarrassment The naming scheme alone has no rhyme or reason. Model names should not be a source of cognitive load.

yewenjie

Honestly I cannot keep up with the naming conventions that keep changing every month. Argon, Carbon, Hydrogen? Luna, Terra, Sol, Astra, Betelgeuse?

modeless

This is a good blog post because of the graphs comparing directly to Terra and Sonnet for both wall-clock time and cost per task. This is the exact information I'm looking for. My TL;DR is: seems like a better choice than Sonnet in areas outside of coding, and at high reasoning it's smarter than Terra but somewhat more expensive.

WarmWash

I really hope hydrogen keeps the excellent conversational ability of 3.8 flash. For brainstorming or even decoding the dense output of the powerhouse models, flash was a real delight to use. Its the first non-SOTA model that I would actually go to often over the larger models, it was fast, plenty smart enough, and generally wrote really well. Here's to hoping hydrogen keeps that up

onlyrealcuzzo

Pretty big Gemini fan, but my initial results with Hydrogen and Carbon are disappointing. They are trading improvements on pass@1 pointless benchmarks for worse disasters at p90/99 that you're going to hit every week in agentic workflows (if not daily): overreach (doing more than asked), overwork (when it should have failed fast), harm (doing the opposite of what was asked), orthogonal work (doing something completely unrelated to what was asked), etc. Google doesn't seem to be the only lab making this trade... The set of benchmarks they released are disappointing. 10 mostly random benchmarks. Really?

theplumber

So a pretty mediocre model at best on par with the open Chinese models. At least the Chinese models have a coherent naming

behat

The orchestrator in Antigravity might be the most important part of this release. I'm excited that this is being built natively into harnesses.

ReptileMan

Are we sure the guy that creates google naming schemes is not held hostage and those are his desperate attempts to communicate with the outside world in concealed way?

thisisauserid

Looks like they are releasing these... periodically!

ComputerGuru

As this is a) being served in Search, b) supposed to be 2.5x faster than 3.8 Flash, c) the element with lowest atomic weight; I deduce that, despite being more capable than 3.8 Flash, now the “entry level” model set to replace 3.5 Flash Lite. But it is priced the same as the non-discounted 3.8 Flash, considerably higher than what anyone is paying today for 3.8 Flash or 3.5 Flash Lite or the deprecated 3.0/2.x Gemini models. How does this work? Is Google abandoning the “fast and cheap” tier? That seems like a mistake since plenty of workflows are absolutely price inelastic, meaning when the 3.8 Flash discount ends at EOY, lots of current enterprise Gemini customers would have to take their business to another shop??

TacticalCoder

Are we going to talk about naming and confusing ways to access it, or are we going to discuss how capable the model is? Every single time a Google model comes out, an army of Anthropic shills sidetrack the discussion. Can we look at what the model does and discuss whether Google is still in the game or not? (naming models and whether you need to access it by clicking a drop-down menu or making a prayer ain't really relevant)