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Comment by babelfish | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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My Gemini app (updated today) and 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?

just Google being whatever the fuck it's been for the past 15 years.

a distributed market research institution with no direction?

they moved it from the place you'd expect to ai.studio

I was reading the announcement and wondering the same. And don't forget, still with 3.1 Pro as the frontier model.

That's weird. I got 3.8 and 3.7 on the days they were released. https://imgur.com/a/Xu4wRLM (this is on gemini.google.com, but the same is true of the iOS app and the desktop app).

Indeed. They have this amazing model and you can’t access it in their own branded app. It’s insane.

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?

My paid company Google Workspace account is stuck on 3.6.

My free gmail account is not.

Gmail gets new features regularly ahead of workspace accounts, nothing new there.

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

In my consumer gmail account with Pro, I see:

  3.5 Flash-Lite
  3.8 Flash
  3.1 Pro

In both a paid Google Workspace account (without the AI addon) and a free 'GSuite' account, I see:

  3.6 Flash
  3.6 Thinking
  3.1 Pro

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.

you think engineers are responsible? why?

It is ridiculous. It took months for 3.1 Pro to become available in an enterprise account.

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.

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.

Same for me, 3.6 in Gemini Chat, and 3.8 available same day as it was announced in AI Studio using the same account.

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.

Same here. But if you install the Antigravity CLI and log in with the same Google account you can select both Gemini 3.7 Flash and 3.8 Flash. Crazy.

When I said I was tired of Google launching waitlists I didn't think they would respond by simply not having a waitlist.

i know this is like "hey guys we got such a cool thing at home ,its rad and uhm we playing with it with our friends"

ok bro thx

I'm glad.

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.

You might as well buy an RTX 6000 Pro Workstation GPU....

Yeah what's up with that. Also what's with the next big update for Nano Banana? Nano Banana Pro was released almost a year ago!

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.

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...

They are going alphabetically, Android style.

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.

They could use caesium or cadmium, which are hardly less weird than argon.

Google R Gon lose the AI race

All-my-tokens-ar-gon

> now standard practice.

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: 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 no promises about what will happen with that model. It failed internal safety standards. Might be scrapped entirely due to a failed training run, for all we know.

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