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I've been using it for a while internally at Google. I prefer Argon over Opus 5.5 because of the clear thinking and directness. It phrases things in an organized, straightforward way.
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Interesting. My favorite LLM output ever was the reasoning traces in gemini 2.5 pro. I found them much easier to understand than the "final output", because they were very structured and concise. Of course, they ended up hiding the reasoning, not long after that, like everyone else... sad!
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If true, this will be a gigantic departure from any model Google have released to date. I’m hopeful but also pretty skeptical.
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I feel Argon is about as good as Opus 5.5 but I find Opus annoyingly sarcastic and incomprehensible.

I know it's a matter of personal taste but it reminds me of a grad student that tries to sound smarter than he is by being dismissive and opaque.

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Opus 5.5 has the personality of a proud righteous nerd, definitely incomprehensible at times, unless you explicitly tells it to slow it down, it crams information far too dense.

Great model to architect and resolve eng. problems in a harness loop tho. Poor handoff.

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Yes, exactly! Maybe not sarcastic but definitely using jargon and being opaque like we all know it, it’s just hinting. Feels like talking to someone who’s constantly trying to prove to me they are smart(er).
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Yes! Literal copy paste from my session with Opus 5.5 this morning:

> You gave me a long answer but it didn’t answer my question: can we safely remove $X

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Agree I do not like the way Opus 5.5 communicates with me. It feels like it is trying to act superior in a condescending way. DO NOT LIKE. I have not used Argon yet but Gemini 3.8 Flash has been a joy to use in comparison (and so fast!) as a daily driver.
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>...trying to act superior in a condescending way...

Strange. I wonder why? Have you adjusted 'roles', added 'ask clarifying questions'? This is most peculiar.

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Sarcastic? wdym?
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Opus has no sense oh humor at all. I wish mine was sarcastic.
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I have used it as well. It is very dense, but it cites with evidence and has a direct and straightforward approach and manner. It doesn't really have a "tone" or mannerisms the way Opus 5 did. It follows instructions and sticks with pretty clean language by default. Argon is solid and handles long horizon well.
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Em dashes are underappreciated — they are visually pleasing, not cluttery like semicolons or definitive like colons.
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in all of my writing I use parenthesis in basically the same way (you know to explain the addendum of information).
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Em dashes are commonly used in most countries that speak English. I get the feeling that people from the USA don’t use them often and now have tarnished the use of them.
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Do you remember when the AIs were all writing with bullet points all the time? I miss that! I'd prefer that to the current more-information-density-than-any-human-would-ever-muster approach where sentences are packed so deep you can't get any meaning by skimming.
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The three great epochs of AI:

Way too many bullets -> way too many emojis -> way too many em dashes

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I have a pet theory that there's some overlap of writing patterns that A) indicate quality, clear communication and B) those that the LLMs have been converging on. As a result, we're ruining the reputation of some great writing patterns because we've associated it with AI slop.
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My pet theory is that this was happening, because labs naturally worked to source highest quality data sources they could get. Even if they initially slurped everything indiscriminately, the obvious next step is to sort them by "quality", and bias towards the high end while trimming from low end.

So obviously, government documents, top publications from liberal arts scholars and STEM > Wikipedia > Reddit (and within, r/AskHistorians > r/all, etc.). The first group is the one most likely to (over)use correct / fancy typography.

I have a related pet theory: the telltale sign of AI writing is being too good for the context it's found in, in terms of vocabulary and style as well as structure.

What is jarring about this is precisely the quality - we associate certain styles with important (or self-important) venues, so it's uncanny to suddenly see random shitposts, copywriting spam, or regular chat replies look like work of NYT bestselling authors or legal scholars - it feels wrong in places we expect basic language, grug-brain reasoning, and lots of typos.

Also, what makes the above much more noticeable, is that AI systems don't have cross-session stylistic memory. From the POV of an LLM, that perfectly fitting, masterfully crafted starter is the first and only time it used it. From the user's POV, it's the tenth time they're seeing it in the span of an hour.

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There's also no voice. If I get a text from a friend, I can hear them. Their tones, their mannerisms. I can't hear Claude because it's not a person that I've met and interacted with.
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AI writing style comes from post-training, which is entirely under the control of the labs. It's not copying it from any public sources.
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I didn't say it's copying anything. It's learning styles - all of them - in pre-training. Post-training is just about giving it the right defaults.

Doesn't change my point anyway - even if post-training, labs naturally want the LLM to come off as smart (well, except for Grok). Post-training is where they "untrained" em-dashes and such, due to complaints of users.

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I'd heard an interesting theory that in training on customer chats there's a lot of interactions like this:

Agent: _wall of text_

User: yeah sounds great, do it

Which has the predictable outcome of biasing towards wall of text responses.

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Continue to write with em dashes. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
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I did at the beginning, but there is only so much you can take, and no one cares if you have read books and seen it before. There were a bunch of programmers whom I thought would understand em dashes, but they did not and said no one uses such dashes only normal hyphens.

Em dashes ended up as one of the first victims of llm age

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Em dashes were already "doomed" at least half a century ago, because they didn't make it into ASCII character set - which arguably is just because they were seen as redundant on ancient typewriters; that's also why they aren't there on normal keyboards, which was a double whammy: inconvenient for programmers to support, inconvenient for users to type.

In other words, since the very start of computer era, the use of em dashes was always a signal.

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At least with a typewriter, if - was sized right you could -- for an emdash.
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They were in models in the first place because they are used ubiquitously published formal writing. As, of course, are semicolons. There is nothing wrong with using punctuation for nuance and structure.
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I feel like the LLMs used them "wrong". They use them for hard breaks for disconnected thoughts rather than one thought that disconnects.
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I think they just used them too much. I suspect that as they naturally form a thematic break point in writing, their probability was unnaturally high at the end of phrases and this led to overuse.

I don't ever recall seeing an LLM using them incorrectly, as opposed to simply at high frequency but correctly (although I'm sure some low param or early models must have done so at some point).

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The dashes reveal AI generated text. For me a trigger to further ignore the text.
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Because you ignored them before someone told you about them.
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can confirm this. I didn't have high expectations for AI writing good long-form content in Indonesian. However, I recently tested it on some of my Indonesian writings and asked Argo to rewrite them while maintaining the original tone—and it absolutely nailed it.
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> Well-written prose is far less likely to go viral but far outstrips the importance rendering a fantasy world in one shot.

I'm not entirely sure you're correct. Your claim boils down to "Writing natural human prose" vs "Broad use of complex software and spatial awareness". My gut feeling is that there's more untapped and fruitful applications in the second group than the first - at least in the short term.

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I missed the em dash — ngl
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As a longtime user of em dashes, I refuse to change my style because bots happen to agree with my choice of punctuation.
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Well, I have to change the way I write at times because my comment gets automatically flagged. :/ Not fun.
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this happens to me as well, meanwhile Pangram claims their false positive rate is 1 in 24000 as if that should be practically negligeable. I bet it's closer to 1 in 10 for gen-x'ers
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It cops hate because people try to pass off LLM written text as their own, then get pissed when called out on it.

If you just want good llm text, it’s great.

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me too. it's like a fingerprint of ai. I think ai should be proud to be itself and be ai.
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Yeah, I never got the hate. If it reads well who cares if it's not something a human does much?

I think there was a lot of misplaced hate of the em-dash due to all the low-qualify AI slop people were trying to pass off as their own for a while.

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The worst part is that it seems they just regex it with the semicolon, making the text harder on the eyes
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I was kinda hoping I'd get to the end and it would say, "In fact, this entire post was drafted by Argon!"
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What was botched about it?
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Announced the model two weeks ago to a ton of hype, model was unavailable for anyone to try. On twitter, Google folks went on a great run taking shots at Muse ("Muse who?"). The hype died down bc nobody could touch the models and meta/muse came out with a similarly capable model in the meanwhile.

At the same time, OpenAI had a disastrous dev day that led a lot of users to jump ship to Claude.

Couple weeks later, Gemini-4-argon is still unavailable on anything less than the ultra tier, which means there's no natural funnel to get ppl to pay for the more expensive ultra plan other than "trust us the model is good".

If Google had argon broadly available earlier this month they would have picked up a ton of new users.

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As someone internal at Google I don't understand why there's so much criticism of Google models... but right now I'm using the next model beyond Argon, and Flash 3.8. In my personal Gemini app I only have access to 3.5.

Models move so fast now and Google is very cautious about releasing them.

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I think google makes great models, my favorite models have been google models. My critisisms are with the infrastructure around the models (or lack of them),things like billing, access, changes to terms and limits, pricing etc. All of these have shown either inconsistency, lack of care, sometimes confusing offerings, and things that felt like rug pulls.

Please google, just make it easy for me to give you money and get what I paid for.

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For agentic coding, Claude Code with the latest Fable or Opus is still just better. That's what people care most about.

Unless Gemini CLI greatly improves and Argon works well in it, this probably won't make a dent in the coding market.

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My complaint, and the complaint of many is not the models - they can be good to very good depending on use case.

What sucks, hard, is googles ability to deploy direct to devs and customers at scale when the deployment is not a longstanding Google project.

Case in point: I’m an ultra subscriber and see in my app right now an ad to try Gemini 4; meanwhile the only models I have available are 3.1 pro,3.6 flash, and 3.8 thinking.

Clicking the try gemini 4 link takes me to a demo prompt that loads 3.6 flash. Srsly

I won’t even start telling you what getting api key based access together was like a year ago.

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People have very short attention spans and cheerlead whoever is winning at any particular point in time.
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"I don't understand why people don't like our models but we can't get our act together on the products they use those models in"
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Uncharitably misreading things on the internet and getting upset about them is not the best hobby
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I agree that reply was unnecessarily rude, but... idk man. I'm a huge cheerleader for Google [1], use 3.1 Pro via AI studio, I'm on a Pro plan... and I can't access this model? Not even a "4 chats per hour" type thing?? I mean, I have video generation access for some reason (no good for me), but Google's policies are baffling to say the least.

Ofc I know this isn't your fault in person, but I really wish Google would get its shit together.

...As a long time tech enthusiast I should probably stop being so delusional. Heh (cries internally)

1: lol I know who cheers for a trillion dollar company but I'd rather not cheer for OpenAI

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Yeah, what I was trying to say is "the criticism doesn't make sense to me because I forget because I have access to the good stuff."

As a Google employee my defense is it's hard for a company this big to move fast, but I can understand how Google customers would be annoyed.

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Didn’t check agy or AI studio, but at least Argon is available in Gemini page/app.
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There's nothing unnecessarily rude about my comment, they are literally unable to get their act together on product.

The top level comment blamed cheerleading but let's apply critical thinking for a second as product people and look at the funnel:

1. Potential users sees new release 2. Potential user takes time to install and set up Google harness (you already lost 90% of people here, the funnel better close quick!) 3. Potential user cannot use new model.

Then what? You hope they developed good will towards your model through this experience?

You stuck a two week wait in your funnel? Is that the definition of not having your act together or what?

We're on HN, how many of us have heard from Google staff this kind of stuff is a result of them growing so big that AI Cloud has to compete with Vertex Cloud, and AI cloud exists because Vertex Cloud needed 2 years to get OAI/Ant style API keys working and were losing dev mindshare in the meantime?

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Why are you doing that then?
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Because Google models are crap. They are on par with local shit models. Last time I tried they were unable to even hold a longer conversation, because they would enter loop and reiterate last answer regardless of the prompt etc.

Then basic mistakes (inferring wrong information from the given text, hallucinations...). Gemini is okay for some absolute basics and the rest of the work goes to actual frontier models.

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How long ago did you try it? Gemini models seem extremely capable to me. I've been using them in ag for over a year and to me the results are great. switching to opus in ag doesn't produce any better results for me
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All the power users are always jumping around by now and many hold the smallest subscription with all the models or at least two.

Narrating this as if it’s the game of thrones is a fun exercise, but it’s just becoming commonplace now that models jump ahead of each other on a weekly to Monthly basis.

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> and many hold the smallest subscription with all the models or at least two

This was part of the issue, as stated in their comment. We couldn't jump around to try it for the reason that is wasn't made available to, as you say, "all the power users".

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You're not convincing me. The war for compute within google is well known by now. Every single product decision stems from that.

Do you really think people in google are happy about how long it took to release this model?

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Why should I care?
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Just for the record, I'm a Spanish user with Google AI pro (€20 per month or so) and my app has Argon now. (Yay!)
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Why did people jump to Claude? I redirected company resources to OpenAI Pro 500 accounts and away from Anthropic for most use.

We’re all running on Astra medium the whole week and loving it.

I’m curious what I missed.

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I'm still a codex man myself but lots of people feel like opus 5.5 just gets it for some projects in a way that astra doesn't. Especially given the fact that astra and sol 6.1 are often at capacity late at night during US hours, when lots of people want to run longer unsupervised projects while they sleep. There's a general sense I've felt reaching some comment threads that openai failed to react with something better than opus 5.5 and are rushing to release small tweaks to make people feel like they're still getting something new.
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Sol is just hilariously slow. Even Luna is slow. It is unusable compared to Claude. I was pretty unhappy with Opus 5 and really gave OpenAI a shot for personal projects, but their quotas are just too small and their capacity issues in the last few weeks have just been untenable. No good. Opus 5.5 is just a very good model, very efficient with usage, gets things done at a reasonable speed. Sonnet 5.5 is also a very nice worker improvement. It is probably on par with Opus 4.6-4.8.
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The sense I get from your comment and the GP comment is that OpenAI’s pricing changes alienated individual users for the sake of the enterprise market. I live in the enterprise market, and was quite pleased with the changes. We don’t really use Sol 6.1, just Astra.

$500/month for 40+ hours a week of Astra usage, with ultrafast mode available when you’re near the weekly reset has made our jobs so much easier. Our product has some sciencey bits as well, ands Astra kills it as a rubber duck in this area.

As a consumer whose 20x account got downgraded, I am a bit sad. I can’t justify $500 a month on personal AI spend. As an engineering manager, I could not be happier with OpenAI’s services. Also, Codex App Server is amazing.

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> Also, Codex App Server is amazing.

Hey, account created 39 days ago. Did you really have to tag that on after all the other stuff? Could you make it any more obvious?

That said this thread is hilarious because it's just an open ai sales manual debating with an anthropic sales manual. It's funny, but it's not, because the truth is that you people are just shitting all over the commons. Someone needs to kick you out but that's not going to happen here.

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:shrug: I spend a lot of those token make local models better, resurrecting old hardware to make it more accessible and usable. Frontier models and AI is cool. This is my lived experience doing real systems engineering projects. My real sales manual is: https://stealthgoat.com/deepswe-flash-next.html local models are kind of awesome now and everyone should be using them in addition to frontier models. I will build the stuff I want which includes optimizing local inference engines until they are at my hardware ceiling. I use this capacity in my house to do reversing, security research, and internal OpenClaw type stuff I find useful.
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They are all very slow at the moment. Some tasks are taking hours to even days. These are DevOps related tasks in which I create hundreds of servers in an agentic way. It works. But it's slow. That's still annoying.
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Gemini 4 is announced be available to Pro users in the Gemini app.

I mean, I heard rumors too that it would be ultra only, but that doesn't seem to be the case, unless you are specifically talking about antigravity?

Realistically, market adoption isn't going to be the result of terminally online people (like me, I confess) following things way too closely on social.

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There weren't "rumors" that it would be Ultra only, that's what Google has announced two weeks ago. Happy to see they've went back on that, but I haven't seen Gemini 4 on any apps till now, and I'm a Google AI Pro subscriber.

edit: just a few hours after this comment I got access to Gemini 4 on the Gemini app. Yayy! :)

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They never said it would be Ultra only. They said, "starting with paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers" in the initial announcement.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...

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That's correct, I've misquoted it. Although, if I understood correctly, it got released to all plans together today right? Or did AI Ultra subscribers have access to it since the first announcement?
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am on pro. updated my apps. no g4. sadge google.
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I got it within the last hour, it is still rolling out.
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On pro as well. I have "4 Argon" in my Gemini web app model dropdown.
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> At the same time, OpenAI had a disastrous dev day that led a lot of users to jump ship to Claude.

Can you elaborate on this?

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There was some backlash around the pricing changes - the $200/month tier offers less usage now, at the same time as the launch of the $500/month tier.

Reddit thread with 247 comments here: https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1wtgv3z/dev_day_l/

Aside from that I'm not sure what was "disastrous" - maybe the lack of a new model release to compete with the just-released Claude Opus 5.5?

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I went from using GPT exclusively to cancelling all my subscriptions with OpenAI.

'backlash' is underwhelming. They single handedly murdered 5.3 codex which was great by making it slooow and duuumb, and pushed people over to their new ones. 5.6 was a decent candidate but it was so slooooow.

And then double or triple the cost for Plus and Pro by nerfing their effective power? I never looked for an alternative faster. They really screwed the pooch.

Been quite happy with deepseek v4.1 flash, muse 1.3 and haiku 5.5.

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"Disastrous" is obviously a loaded term, and it can be debated, but from what I collect, the reasons are

- Dots. People don't understand it. Their presentation didn't explain it properly at all. Additionally, many people thought it's stupid, and that the cutesy mascots are dystopian.

- Voice mode didn't work in their presentation. The demo failed.

- 200$ plan goes 20x -> 10x usage. 500$ plan introduced, 25x usage. The contrast is stark.

- "Ultrafast": 8x pricing on subscription plan (6x API). That's 80$ input, 400$ output, 100$ cache write. Hello?! Additionally, since it generates 8x faster, it consumes your quota 8x faster. Per wall-clock minute, it's 64x more usage spend per minute of generating. People report that on the 500$ plan, their weekly usage is gone in 40-100 minutes.

- People believe gpt-6.1-sol was planned to be released as astra-minor, but OpenAI renamed it at the last possible time, because gpt-6-sol is a disaster (this I can get behind)

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Pulled astra 6.1 at the last moment (allegedly) and only released a dirty looper sol 6.1. Also released dots which are unavailable in EU. There may have been more but no one cared.
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and dots are only on $100+ plan.
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"model was unavailable for anyone to try"

Oh yeah. Completely forgot about that. Big headlines and big claims, but no one could actually use it and report on it.

Does seem like they don't quite grasp how the hype train operates. Or maybe they don't care as much.

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I added Gemini 4 Argon to our video creation benchmarks.

The results are a bit disappointing given Googles scale and training data.

The results are on par with cheaper Chinese open source models to be frank. https://cliphou.se/benchmark/

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Unpopular opinion: em-dash is fine
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> That said, the em-dash is back w/ this model.

noooooooo

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> far outstrips the importance rendering a fantasy world in one shot.

Given FelonyBench, do we also have a FantasyBench?

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