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

What happened

Hydrogen is available now through the Gemini API (the interface one piece of software uses to talk to another), the Gemini app, Google Search and Google Antigravity. Google has released Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a fast general-purpose AI model meant for developers and everyday users. Google is a software and Internet company based in Mountain View, and its products and services include Google Search and Software tools.

Google's Gemini 4 Hydrogen replaces the Flash series, but benchmarks suggest it also makes the pricier Argon obsolete. On the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Hydrogen nearly matches Claude Sonnet 5.5 for less money but costs about 2.5 times more per task than GPT-6.1 Sol and still falls short on agentic (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) coding.

The model offers four reasoning levels, a one-million-token context window (how much text a model can consider at once) for both input and output, and costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. 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. 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.