My guess, by atomic weight. Hydrogen = "sonnet". Carbon = "opus". Argon = "Fable" only argon 4 just happens to be kinda shit? But also it's google so who the hell knows. They could be just going alphabetical argon, then carbon, then hydrogen as release order follows the alphabet. That'd be kinda dumb but so is their access/subscription strategy so it'd be on brand.

I thought they were going by alphabetical order like intel does for GPUs

A = argon for initial release B was skipped because you can't name a product boron C = carbon D = ??????

They might be going for atomic weight, but the average person couldn't say whether argon or carbon was heavier.

"Argon" had me thinking they would go with a noble gas theme, with Helium as the light one and Xeon as the heavyweight.

[delayed]

Carbon can be more performant while being a smaller model.

[delayed]

I like the theory, curious how this will evolve though

Also... Argon and Carbon are the same price, but Carbon is better I guess?

And "Hydrogen surpasses Argon on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at its default high thinking level"

Given it's twice the price of 3.8 Flash I hope they would find room for another cheaper tier, but the Hydrogen name suggests not.

I'm glad Google are coming out with some decent models but it's a slightly confusing line up.

The higher the atomic mass, the higher the intelligence.

It's not, Gemini 4 Carbon is better than Gemini 4 Argon.

Carbon > Argon > Hydrogen not that hard?

They are all terribly named, but Gemini models definitely take the cake right now.

They started out alphabetical for their pro releases: argon, barium (never released), carbon

Then they needed a flash model so they picked the lightest element.

They dropped the ball pretty quickly