Issue 4 October 2026

Google’s new frontier model, Gemini 4 Argon, comes with the usual flourish of benchmarks. It is state of the art on DeepSWE v1.1, a test of long, real-world software engineering, at 77.9%. It tops the Vals Index of economically weighted knowledge work, leads Zapier’s AutomationBench at 51.3% and scores 91.7% on LVBench, a long-video test. Its maximum output grows from 64,000 tokens to 1m, enough for a single chain of reasoning to run to hundreds of thousands of tokens. The internal anecdotes are more persuasive than the leaderboards. Argon agents are porting Google’s C and C++ code to memory-safe Rust, up to the 800,000-line Zircon kernel of Fuchsia. One rebuilt video decoder runs 2.7 times faster than the earlier Rust port, and fleet-wide memory tuning has already freed more than 300 tebibytes. Those are the claims of a company using its own product in anger, not of a marketing department.