> We’ll continue to gather feedback from early testers as we iterate on guardrails before making Argon available to developers, enterprises, and consumers as soon as possible.
Gemini not beating the "can't release a model" allegations
My Gemini app (updated today) and <a href="https://gemini.google.com/" rel="nofollow">https://gemini.google.com/ has _3.6_ as the latest selectable model, as a paying Pro user in the US. How is that even possible? Gemini 3.7 was released in August, 3.8 early September. What is going on over there?
That's weird. I got 3.8 and 3.7 on the days they were released. <a href="https://imgur.com/a/Xu4wRLM" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/Xu4wRLM (this is on gemini.google.com, but the same is true of the iOS app and the desktop app).
I would imagine you are experiencing a bug. I've been using 3.8 daily since its release (on a Pro plan in Canada). I believe this is true of many people.
What is your reason to believe this is not a bug specific to a small set of Pro users?
Would that change anything about the conclusion? Having a "bug" that changes available model options for some small set of Pro users 3 months after launch certainly qualifies as a wtf-are-they-even-doing level of bug in my book.
My corporate workspace which seem to be a pro account is limited to 3.6 but my personal account at 20/month has given me the latest model always immediately. Flash 3.8 is my go to model for pretty much everything those days
We're on Enterprise Standard, our renewal was up like 50% because "Gemini is included now think of all the added value" yet they won't even give us the latest models. I tried hard to champion Gemini internally once every user had it included, yet we ended up spending extra on Claude because Gemini has stagnated. Even the included usage for the Gemini CLI was taken away and now requires an extra subscription. I wonder if we we'll even see Gemini 4 before 2028. It's ridiculous.
Every time I hear stuff like this, I think of that Office Space thing... you don't want the Engineers talking directly to the customers.. well it sounds like the Engineers are also handling all releases and business decisions willy nilly.
Because I have worked with responsible engineers, but it seems like Google is overrun by them there's a lot of really bad business stuff going on. It's like when I think of AWS, nothing on there is named for business people, its all really bad names that IT / Devs come up with.
AWS as a whole is sold to businesspeople, sure, but the individual AWS products are definitely being sold to engineers. S3 and EC2 don't need to have layperson-friendly names, since laypeople don't understand what they are or why one would or wouldn't use them - those are CTO/tech lead decisions.
I still have simpler conversations when talking about Azure services and naming them, they have reasonable names. I never did anything with GCP so I cannot compare, but I assume their naming scheme is also reasonable. It feels to me like AWS was basically they decided to offer some of their internal things externally, nobody renamed anything, and then they just ran with it.
Seeing the same - definitely frustrating. 3.8 seems decent, but I’m still unable to use it at work because Google has been so slow to release it to Google Workspace customers.
This is why I've heard you should just use openrouter for these models. Whatever google is doing/hiring for the dev ux is doing a terrible job.
Is this something you've tried to figure out? I'd love to hear more from you here. Are you sure you're not just on a Plus plan? How much are you paying monthly? Are you sure it's the AI pro plan? What does Google One say? <a href="https://one.google.com/" rel="nofollow">https://one.google.com/
They're just following the current AI marketing playbook. "Our new model is simply too dangerous to release to the public right away" is now standard practice.
They even gave their model a random nonsensical name suffix simply because OpenAI is now doing it, too. Monkey see, monkey do.
I'm still at a loss as to what argon has to do with anything. Say what you will about Luna-Terra-Sol-Astra, or Haiku-Sonnet-Opus, they make sense. I don't see how Google can make sense of argon; it's in a fairly strange place in the periodic table...
Yeah, I heard the next one was Barium...or was it Boron?
I was going to say I don't know what they'd do for C, since Carbon and Calcium are already things. But knowing Google, they'll probably call it Chromium.
Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1, literally state of the art (in their respective class), were just released without any prior announcement. This has pure and simple become a Google thing.
OpenAI said they dropped Astra 6.1 over safety concerns: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-chatgpt-model-release-cancel-safety-5a2f9f42" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-chatgpt-model-release-can...
I don't read that as the same category: There was no announcement, no benchmarks, no limited release and not even any indication what happens with the model. The model failed internal safety standards. Might be scrapped entirely.
They will go through the usual transition of "can't release a model" to "won't load in a harness normal people can use for 3-4 weeks" to "it's smart as hell but completely inept at tool use and coding" to "now it's behind everyone else" ... like every Gemini release.
I have said this before here, but. I don't think they care.
Google gains very little by having us use their models for coding. It doesn't help them in their core mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful ^W^W^W^W^W^W[and turn it into ad revenue]"), nor would it be anything close to substantial revenue compared to the ads revenue firehose they already have.
They will push AI in a direction that serves their existing goals and service the coding agent model only as is necessary.
Then why don’t they just do that? I read this constantly, that Google has different goals (world models, ad rev, recursive looping, quantum computing AI, magic, whatever weekly hype words go around, etc.), but they continue to try competing with model releases focused on coding performance, benchmark results and agentic harnesses.
If Googles goal was something other than those, why expend Billions in time and effort? Alternatively, they want a part of the regular model use pie, they just struggle to compete. QED, there is no secrete alternate goal here.
Well, I worked there for 10 years and I can tell you that they're incapable of making a singular focused decision and executing on almost anything.
There's likely all kinds of internal competition and disagreements and dysfunctions.
babelfish · · focus · HN ↗
Gemini not beating the "can't release a model" allegations
modeless · · focus · HN ↗
ionwake · · focus · HN ↗
ok bro thx
Androider · · focus · HN ↗
vlyan · · focus · HN ↗
forshaper · · focus · HN ↗
AuthAuth · · focus · HN ↗
XzAeRosho · · focus · HN ↗
asdfasgasdgasdg · · focus · HN ↗
fr2029 · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
ttul · · focus · HN ↗
wasabi991011 · · focus · HN ↗
What is your reason to believe this is not a bug specific to a small set of Pro users?
bobtheborg · · focus · HN ↗
My free gmail account is not.
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
HotHotLava · · focus · HN ↗
jeanloolz · · focus · HN ↗
benhurmarcel · · focus · HN ↗
Google just takes months to roll out their models to everyone.
rahimnathwani · · focus · HN ↗
r1ch · · focus · HN ↗
giancarlostoro · · focus · HN ↗
RugnirViking · · focus · HN ↗
giancarlostoro · · focus · HN ↗
wavemode · · focus · HN ↗
giancarlostoro · · focus · HN ↗
yearolinuxdsktp · · focus · HN ↗
The excuse was it was still “in preview” and the enterprise didn’t opt in to the preview channel.
With Google, it’s either in beta or deprecated.
tdboorman · · focus · HN ↗
Yizahi · · focus · HN ↗
sergiotapia · · focus · HN ↗
selcuka · · focus · HN ↗
lp92 · · focus · HN ↗
kyrra · · focus · HN ↗
bakugo · · focus · HN ↗
They even gave their model a random nonsensical name suffix simply because OpenAI is now doing it, too. Monkey see, monkey do.
A_D_E_P_T · · focus · HN ↗
brainwad · · focus · HN ↗
IX-103 · · focus · HN ↗
I was going to say I don't know what they'd do for C, since Carbon and Calcium are already things. But knowing Google, they'll probably call it Chromium.
A_D_E_P_T · · focus · HN ↗
fooker · · focus · HN ↗
ryandrake · · focus · HN ↗
jstummbillig · · focus · HN ↗
Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1, literally state of the art (in their respective class), were just released without any prior announcement. This has pure and simple become a Google thing.
kevinh · · focus · HN ↗
jstummbillig · · focus · HN ↗
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
mrshadowgoose · · focus · HN ↗
They made their model so hard for people to drop into workflows, that people just... didn't.
Lack of adoption caused them to lose out on usage-based training data needed to smooth out their model's rough edges and progress the frontier.
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
Google gains very little by having us use their models for coding. It doesn't help them in their core mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful ^W^W^W^W^W^W[and turn it into ad revenue]"), nor would it be anything close to substantial revenue compared to the ads revenue firehose they already have.
They will push AI in a direction that serves their existing goals and service the coding agent model only as is necessary.
Topfi · · focus · HN ↗
If Googles goal was something other than those, why expend Billions in time and effort? Alternatively, they want a part of the regular model use pie, they just struggle to compete. QED, there is no secrete alternate goal here.
cmrdporcupine · · focus · HN ↗
There's likely all kinds of internal competition and disagreements and dysfunctions.
So there's that.
mrieck · · focus · HN ↗
I already pay $300+ for subs. Please don't tempt me with another $100 sub just because I got curious if the benchmarks were right.
giancarlostoro · · focus · HN ↗
maleldil · · focus · HN ↗
Culonavirus · · focus · HN ↗