Google’s Gemini 4 Hydrogen outscores the bigger Argon just four weeks after its launch

Google has released Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a fast general-purpose AI model meant for developers and everyday users. Unlike the frontier models Gemini 4 Carbon and Gemini 4 Argon, which Google designed for deep, long-horizon reasoning on hard problems, Hydrogen is meant to handle everyday tasks quickly and cheaply.

It appears to be the counterpart to the earlier Flash series. That comparison may sell it short, though. According to Google, Hydrogen beats the larger Argon on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at the default “high” thinking level (51 vs. 50) and reaches up to 54 at the highest level, “xhigh.”Ad Hydrogen offers four thinking levels: low, medium, high (the default), and a new xhigh tier, while Argon offers only medium and high. The model has a one-million-token context window for input and can output one million tokens. It costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. Cache hits cost $0.075.Ad Hydrogen apparently ends up both more capable and cheaper than Argon. Adding to the confusion, when Google announced its new frontier model Carbon just two days ago, the company recommended sticking with Argon for daily coding work. Hydrogen should make that advice moot, leaving Argon obsolete less than four weeks after its release. Hydrogen delivers a major jump over the previous Flash generation Google pitches Hydrogen as a standalone model and a big upgrade over Gemini 3.8 Flash. At the default thinking level, Google says it finishes tasks 2.5 times faster. On Terminal-Bench 4.1, the score jumps from 18.2 percent (Flash) to 57 percent (Hydrogen). Hallucinations dropped by a factor of five, and the model recovers better when a tool call fails or a search comes up empty, Google says.Ad On open-ended agent tasks like research, data analysis, and code navigation, Hydrogen ranks fifth on the Agent Arena leaderboard. Google says it takes first place on the Vals Tax Agent Bench with 52.3 percent and ties for first on the Vals Legal Research Bench with 55.8 percent. For multimodal knowledge work like summarizing large PDFs, spreadsheets, or videos, Hydrogen supports up to one million output tokens on top of its one-million-token input window.