After this week’s Carbon availability, Google today unveiled Gemini 4 Hydrogen instead of keeping the “Flash” branding. This model is billed as bringing “cutting-edge intelligence to everyone.”
Compared to Gemini 3.8 Flash (which launched in September), Hydrogen is billed as a “major standalone upgrade” with “significant leaps in both speed and intelligence.” It offers native 1 million-token input and up to 1 million output tokens. Specifically:
“Hydrogen surpasses Argon on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at its default high thinking level (51 vs. 50, and reaching 54 at its highest xhigh thinking setting), while often completing tasks faster than models in its class.”
In the Gemini app, Hydrogen is better at following and sticking to your tone, format, and rules, while offering clear tables and visual breakdowns. As such, “email drafts, study guides, rewrites, and documents come back ready to use on the first try.” Additionally, Hydrogen “more frequently calls the right tools (i.e., Connected Apps) and skills for the job.”
In the model picker, 4 Hydrogen is billed as providing “Everyday help.”
Free users in the Gemini app get access to Hydrogen via the “[Auto] model selection when it’s the appropriate model for the prompt.”
Google says Hydrogen significantly upgrades Search (AI Mode) by better understanding your intent:
…you can ask your question in your natural flow of thought — even if you have multiple parts to your query, hard-to-understand typos, or highly specific requests — and Search will intelligently comprehend what you’re looking for.
Responses get more visual and will feature a wider range of relevant links. Hydrogen is the default model for AI Mode and is used for “your hardest questions” in AI Overviews.
This was a nice surprise when I opened the app an hour or two ago. It seems to be noticeably better, too.
In Google Antigravity, 4 Hydrogen has an “Extra” thinking tier alongside Low, Medium, and High. Then there’s Orchestrator: “Carbon that may offload routine steps to Hydrogen. Same Carbon-level quality, fewer tokens used.”
To help make this multi-model collaboration automatic, we’re introducing Orchestrator in Google Antigravity. Rather than using a single model from start to finish, Orchestrator dynamically switches between models like Carbon and Hydrogen within the same session.
For workflows that require parallel agents, Carbon can act as the coordinator while Hydrogen can power worker and verifier agents to build and test changes simultaneously across isolated workspaces — helping teams ship complex projects faster without driving up token costs.
Hydrogen is available in Antigravity for paid Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.
For developers, Hydrogen costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens.
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