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Gemini 4 Hydrogen
134 points70 comments125.2 average comments/hourSubmitted by dvaplima
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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??
Comment on Hacker News · 3 direct repliesThis 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
Comment on Hacker News · 2 direct repliesI 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.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesGood they are able to replace Flash. And cool this is available to everyone via search. But I still don’t understand Googles strategy with these new models. For pro sub, Argon is still very limited and Carbon is only available on Ultra. This is not competitive at all. To say nothing of also being locked into Antigravity.
Comment on Hacker NewsIt's starting to feel like OpenAI is in 3rd place now. Really eager to see how / if they can claw their way back up.
Comment on Hacker NewsPersonally I found my usage of llms bimodal, I only have uses for the top frontier models (for research and development) or for the cheapest and fastest ones (to use in production for consolidated, simple flows). I am curious what people find the mid tier models useful for.
Comment on Hacker News · 2 direct repliesI 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
Comment on Hacker NewsThe pricing on these models make really little sense. This is $1.5. Argon is $2. Carbon is also $2 for now. Feel like this pricing only makes sense for a product where you don't even select the model. Maybe Antigravity is like that.
Comment on Hacker NewsThe orchestrator in Antigravity might be the most important part of this release. I'm excited that this is being built natively into harnesses.
Comment on Hacker NewsThis 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.
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