alan blount

Google’s new Gemini 4 Argon equals GPT-6 Astra on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 60% of the Cost per Task with discounted prices. Google is now back to being one of the top three labs in intelligence achieved Gemini 4 Argon is @GoogleDeepMind’s first proprietary model above the Flash class in over 7 months. With high reasoning (the highest available), it scores 53 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, matching GPT-6 Astra (max, 53) and 1 point ahead of GPT-6.1 Sol (max, 52), with gains driven by lower hallucinations and stronger agentic capabilities. At its current 50% pricing discount and with cache discounts increased to 95%, Gemini 4 Argon costs $1.99 per Intelligence Index task, 60% of GPT-6 Astra (max), but 2.7x GPT-6.1 Sol (max). After the discount ends, this will rise to $3.98 (~1.2x GPT-6 Astra (max)). Gemini 4 Argon is currently being rolled out to selected users and is not publicly available. The 50% discount is an initial promotion. Google has not yet confirmed the promotion end date Key benchmarking results for Gemini 4 Argon with high reasoning: ➤ Google returns as one of the top three labs on intelligence: Gemini 4 Argon (high) scores 53 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, matching GPT-6 Astra (max, 53) and 1 point ahead of GPT-6.1 Sol (max, 52). This is 23 points above Google’s previous non-Flash model, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview (30) and 12 points ahead of Gemini 3.8 Flash (high) ➤ Launch discounts of 50% make Gemini 4 Argon competitive on Cost per Task: At current discounted pricing, Gemini 4 Argon (high) costs $1.99 per Intelligence Index task, 60% of GPT-6 Astra (max, $3.26) for a comparable level of intelligence. This cost efficiency is driven by lower token prices, rather than reduced token use, with Gemini 4 Argon averaging 62k output tokens per task, compared with 27k for GPT-6 Astra (max). Google has not yet confirmed the promotion end date, but on standard pricing, Cost per Task will increase to $3.98 ➤ Stronger agentic performance: Historically a weaker area for Gemini models, Gemini 4 Argon shows improvements across agentic evaluations. It ranks #1 on AutomationBench-AA at 77.5%, 6 points ahead of Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max, 71.3%). On Terminal Bench 4, Gemini 4 Argon achieves 57%, a +53 point improvement from Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, only behind Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max, 64%), Claude Opus 5.5 (max, 60%) and GPT-6 Astra (59%). On AA-Briefcase, it reaches 1494 Elo. This is driven by a 65% rubric pass rate, the highest we have recorded, but lower Analytical Quality (1576 Elo) and Presentation Quality (1308 Elo) ➤ Lowest hallucination rate among leading models: On AA-Omniscience, Gemini 4 Argon has a 15% hallucination rate, the lowest of any model scoring 45+ on the Intelligence Index, compared with 51% for GPT-6 Astra (max) and 54% for GPT-6.1 Sol (max). This means Argon is much more likely to acknowledge when it does not know an answer rather than guess incorrectly. On accuracy, Gemini 4 Argon scores 50%, a 5 point decrease from Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, and 13 points below GPT-6 Astra (max, 63%). With this slightly lower accuracy, its overall AA-Omniscience score of 42 remains in line with GPT-6 Astra (43) and GPT-6.1 Sol (42) Key model details: ➤ Context Window: 1M tokens ➤ Multimodality: Text, image, video, and speech input, with text output ➤ Pricing: $4/$20 per 1M input/output tokens at standard pricing, currently discounted 50% to $2/$10. Cached input tokens receive a 95% discount ($0.10 per 1M at discounted pricing), up from 90% on Gemini 3.8 Flash ➤ Long Decode Continuation: We tested Gemini 4 Argon with Long Decode Continuation, a new Gemini API feature that pauses long responses and resumes them across follow-up calls. This lets reasoning run up to 1M output tokens without request timeouts