Deep|LLM: Gemini 4 Brings Google Back into Frontier Competition as Investment Accelerates

Google announced Gemini 4 Argon on September 30, roughly ten months after Gemini 3. On Google’s evaluations, Argon leads or ties GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 on 14 of 19 benchmarks. Artificial Analysis scores it at 53, level with Astra and below Opus 5.5 at 58 and Sonnet 5.5 at 56. Google is back in frontier competition, though it still trails OpenAI and Anthropic overall.

Introductory pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, rising to $4/$20 at the standard rate. We use this input/output convention throughout. Access is initially limited to trusted testers, with paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers next in line.

Two months ago, many investors thought Google was stepping back from frontier models. Gemini 3.5 Pro had missed its launch window and been shelved, leaving Google reliant on Flash-tier models. On August 5, Demis Hassabis stepped down as DeepMind CEO to become its chairman and Alphabet’s chief scientist. Jeff Dean left to found Discovery Loop with Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le and others. Koray Kavukcuoglu took over DeepMind’s day-to-day operations, reporting to Sundar Pichai.

Alphabet fell about 5% that day. Much of the commentary saw a shift toward selling compute and distributing AI applications. Tim O’Reilly drew a parallel with Westinghouse, suggesting Google might focus on infrastructure and wider AI adoption. Our view was different: Google would keep investing in frontier models, and a tighter focus would give it room to catch up. Argon’s results support that view. The training run began before the reorganization, however, so the effect of the management changes on R&D will only become clear over the next few model generations.