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.
I pay for Ultra and have been using Argon for a couple weeks. I just checked in both Agy and Gemini and Carbon is there for me now, too. I'll try it, but Argon is itself already so slow that I'm not sure Carbon will make sense for most activities.
On pro here and I can do about 2 design tasks a week before I hit usage limits with Argon. The usage limit with carbon is probably gone just loading the context.
I have Carbon in my consumer Gemini too. I have a Google drive storage upgrade that I pay for that I assume is bundled with it - it's the only thing I can think of as I've certainly not gone out of my way to do anything special to get access (and so far, it is free for me to access it this way)
In one case I had to upgrade my Antigravity GUI to see new models, I guess because of an API change.
At the same time, the CLI saw the new models without any change. Possibly that was just because my CLI install was newer than the GUI one. (Edit: oh, it's because my CLI autoupdates. Autoupdates for the GUI on Linux in an AppImage is... messy.)
Edit: But in this case:
> Gemini 4 Carbon is available via the API in Google AI Studio and Gemini for business for all paying developers and enterprises
They just took 3.1 pro away from me while I was asking about Cami Clark and Epstein (for due-dilligince), lol. Now I have access to 3.6 Flash and 3.5 flash-light. So I canceled my sub. Shame. I used to love using antigravity when the allowance was good.
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.
For OAI and Anthropic releases we usually get a "pelican" here in the comments pretty (suspiciously) quickly, which then also happens to be on top of the comments. I always found that pretty weird given that's not an actual model "evaluation". It's provocative and gets the people going, I guess.
This happens not so much when Google or other labs release (not even on the Argon release post, afaik). Make of that what you will. Not sure if Google is sending a nod or a wink... ;-)
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.
Deepseek is good enough for me that I use it for everything cost sensitive. I tend to switch to Google's models for world knowledge, planning, and complicated bugs that Deepseek gets stuck on. Argon is also a great writer in my experience, hopefully Carbon is the same. Seems like RL for code generation ruins most model's communication abilities. V4.1 Flash 1017 is a significant step back from the previous Deepseek model in that respect, despite being a noticeably better coder.
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.
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.
With Plus subscription this is in the list of available models, but says: "Unavailable - Gemini 4 Carbon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers."
> 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?
> 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
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.
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.
My personal "AI Pro" Gemini has 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.8 Flash, 3.1 Pro, 4 Argon.
Pretty inconsistent.
Is the issue that consumers get it sooner or is the roll out random or locked to some other factor?
At the same time, the CLI saw the new models without any change. Possibly that was just because my CLI install was newer than the GUI one. (Edit: oh, it's because my CLI autoupdates. Autoupdates for the GUI on Linux in an AppImage is... messy.)
Edit: But in this case:
> Gemini 4 Carbon is available via the API in Google AI Studio and Gemini for business for all paying developers and enterprises
I.e. Seems to be API only right now.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNbkThtNzS8
This happens not so much when Google or other labs release (not even on the Argon release post, afaik). Make of that what you will. Not sure if Google is sending a nod or a wink... ;-)
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.
At my work, Argon is deemed to be too expensive, and gemini-3.8 flash is just not good enough.
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
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.
> It is also rolling out to all Google AI Ultra subscribers
However for what its worth the $20 plan got Argon like a day or so later.
Google branding strikes again
Amazing, can we now close this pelican benchmark and move on to different things?
pelicanmaxxing is here.
What's the recommended coding harness I should be using to test it out? (Recommended by folks here, not by Google...)
Argon was announced 30 September, publicly available 13 October. Carbon announced 28 October, publicly available 10 November.