Google launches Gemini 4 Hydrogen, 2.5x faster than Gemini 3.8 Flash

Top News · 495 HN points

Gemini 4 Hydrogen is Google’s new model for everyday coding and agent workflows. Google reports 2.5x faster task completion and more than triple the Terminal-Bench 4.1 results of Gemini 3.8 Flash at the default high setting.

Here’s what changed:

• Hydrogen surpasses Gemini 4 Argon on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at default high thinking, according to Google.
• Antigravity’s Orchestrator switches between Carbon and Hydrogen, delivering near-Carbon Terminal-Bench 4.0 success with 24% less quota and 19% faster completion on average.
• Pricing is flat across the 1-million-token context window at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens.
• Four reasoning settings, low, medium, high, and xhigh, let you trade quality against latency and cost.

One catch: Google positions Carbon and Argon, not Hydrogen, for deeper, long-horizon reasoning.

Try it: Use the Gemini API in AI Studio or Android Studio. Google Antigravity access requires a paid Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription. Also available via Vercel, releasebot.io, LiteLLM, Google AI Developers Forum

Sources: blog.google · blog.google