Google unveils long-awaited Gemini 4

Por Madison Mills — Axios

Google is unveiling its long-awaited next-generation AI model, Gemini 4 Argon, to a small group of cybersecurity partners, the company said Wednesday.

Why it matters: Gemini 4 arrives after a long gap at the top of Google’s model lineup, in which the company kept rolling out smaller, cheaper Flash models while rivals OpenAI and Anthropic sprinted forward.

State of play: Google says Gemini 4 Argon is built to handle complex, long-running tasks in software engineering, finance, legal work and cybersecurity.

• Google said the new model is state of the art on certain coding and knowledge work benchmarks, outperforming competing OpenAI frontier model GPT-6 Astra on several.
• The company is rolling the model out only to a group of trusted cybersecurity defenders and is participating in the U.S. government’s voluntary pre-release process.
• Google says it will expand access after additional testing, with paying subscribers first in line.

What they’re saying: “Argon is a well-rounded model that has frontier capabilities across several domains,” Tulsee Doshi, head of Gemini products at Google DeepMind, told Axios.

• “We’ve seen strong performance up close as Googlers have put the model through its paces in recent weeks, with many relying on it for their hardest coding and research problems.”

Flashback: Gemini 4 comes out nearly a year after the previous flagship model generation, Gemini 3.

• In May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s next major model release would come in June.
• That model, widely expected to be Gemini 3.5 Pro, never came out.
• In July, Axios reported that poor morale among Google DeepMind employees was part of the reason for the delay.

Zoom in: Google’s additional time investment may not be viewed as negatively in the context of the AI safety debate that has embroiled companies and users.

• OpenAI has had issues with agents going rogue, and recently said it is scrapping GPT-6.1 Astra due to security issues.
• Top AI developers OpenAI and Anthropic are investigating tens of thousands of incidents involving their agents misbehaving, Axios previously reported.

The bottom line: If the developer community finds Gemini 4 to be as competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic’s frontier systems as the benchmarks indicate, it would result in a massive catch-up for an AI company some had started to doubt.

Fonte: Axios