Gemini 4 Argon, Greek for lazy, ties GPT-6 Astra for 60% of the cost

Google releases Gemini 4 Argon

Google's first proprietary model above Flash in over seven months ties GPT-6 Astra on the Artificial Analysis index at 60% of the cost per task while the discount lasts, and tops the Vals Index. The API costs $2/$10 per million tokens until 30 Nov, then $4/$20; Pro and Ultra subscribers get it in the Gemini app, Ultra in Antigravity.

Impressed, with trust issues. @emollick: "the first non-OpenAI/Anthropic model to pass the Fable/Mythos/Astra bar." @theo called it "a huge jump for Gemini" but "Does weird shit regularly and I don't feel like I can trust it at all." A 641-pt r/singularity post, "Welcome back: Gemini 2.5 Pro", showed it naming Joe Biden as president.

Super happy to see Google back, and the people who tested it for a week liked it more than they expected (Dan Shipper admits he "was ready to trash this model"). Mollick finds it "a little lazy" (at Every it closed its own code review 30 milliseconds after opening it, 17 times out of 38), but to be fair Google warned us: argon is Greek for "lazy" (it's the gas that reacts with nothing).

1. An OpenAI engineer is arrested for bugging an executive meeting room

OpenAI says it found a hidden recording device, used its models to trace it to an employee, and called the FBI; it has no sign that weights, code or customer data left. Prosecutors say it sat behind a TV, wrapped in toilet paper (@ChrisGPT).

Mostly jokes at OpenAI's expense. r/singularity's top reply, on "we used our models": "These guys never skip a beat with the advertising." @theo: "Engineer who bugged OpenAI office identified as GPT-3 pretraining lead Dario Amodei" (139K).

Heat: very high · 20.6M views, 31 posts (14.5M on OpenAI's post) · 852 pts on r/singularity

2. [rumour] OpenAI has found a way to cut inference costs by 50%

r/accelerate's top post of the day shares a claim that OpenAI used an internal model to improve its own algorithms and halve inference costs, quoting Tibo Sottiaux: a plan for "significantly more usage for everyone" (1.2M).

Cheers, and a cynical read. The top reply: inference "will get x10 cheaper per month". Another: "Tibo is handing out the resets because people are unhappy with OpenAI and they are losing users to Anthropic."

Heat: high · 1.2M views, 2 posts · 726 pts on r/accelerate

3. Anthropic replaced git with its own source control after merges grew tenfold

Merges went from about 2,500 a day in May to over 30,000 in September. A team of seven built Scion and moved the monorepo off git in five months, and checkouts now take seconds.

Awe at the speed. @sweis had seen such projects take years: "It was done in 5 months and is supporting 10X the volume." @LinusEkenstam: "So crazy they had to move from Git. Also it seems like new model is imminent."

Heat: high · 4.4M views, 17 posts (4.3M on Anthropic's post) · 39 pts on r/accelerate

4. Jack Clark now thinks full recursive self-improvement is more likely to become possible in 2027

In Import AI, Anthropic's co-founder writes: "I now think it's more likely we'll see full RSI become possible in 2027, whereas before I thought it was more likely in 2028" (@kimmonismus).

Euphoria on r/accelerate, where a 458-pt thread saw "a very strong possibility we're only less than 6 months away now". @peterwildeford objected to Anthropic people describing AI progress "as if they were the weather, when people at Anthropic are directly the ones making these things happen."

Heat: medium · 448K views, 22 posts · 458 pts on r/accelerate

5. [rumour] Claude Fable 5.5 is slated for this week

It showed up in Azure's East US 2 model catalog marked GenerallyAvailable (@alexgetmancom, 280K), and @synthwavedd says Anthropic plans to ship it this week.

Impatience. @kimmonismus: "Fable 5.5 is very, very close." @synthwavedd, to Google: "Enjoy your brief time in the limelight little Argon 🫶". A 175-pt r/singularity thread waits for it.

Heat: medium · 758K views, 41 posts · 175 pts on r/singularity

6. Grok Bot gets its own email address and can pay for things

▶ Watch the video

Version 0.70.2 lets bots claim an email address and send mail with your approval, pay with X Money or Stripe Link, and ask before purchases, posts or deletions (@mark_k).

A wave of fan demos, led by Musk, who posted about it at least eight times, from "Grok @Bot is like hiring a super smart employee" (2.7M) to tax help. @liam_fallen put it on his phone's Action Button: "I feel like James Bond" (718K).

Heat: very high · 13.0M views, 147 posts (2.7M on Musk's top post) · quiet on Reddit

7. Fish Audio releases Drama 3, a voice model you direct word by word, with open weights

▶ Watch the video

Launched with a $52M seed: you set how a single word sounds or shift tone mid-sentence. Artificial Analysis ranks it the #1 open-weights TTS model and first on pronunciation (93.2%), ahead of Eleven v4.

Builders loved the one-word fix (still invite-only). @shiri_shh: "ElevenLabs CEO opening X this morning to find his entire product released with open weights 😭" (365K). @dravenip: the best feature "might be fixing ONE word without regenerating the entire audio".

Heat: very high · 9.7M views, 31 posts (8.1M on the launch) · quiet on Reddit

8. XBOW wins Google's $250K Chrome bounty with an exploit built on GPT-5.6 Sol

It chained three bugs so that visiting a web page takes over a Windows PC, in six days and about $40,000 of compute (@IntCyberDigest). It's only the second full-chain award of that size in Chrome's history.

Few takes beyond the announcements. OpenAI's @gdb: it "Highlights the opportunity for defenders to utilize these tools to secure their software to unprecedented levels" (374K).

Heat: medium · 904K views, 15 posts · quiet on Reddit

9. Liquid AI's LFM2.5-24B-A2B: 24B parameters, 2B active, for on-device agents

The largest and last LFM2.5 model scores 48.09 on LiveClaw agent tasks to Qwen3.6-35B-A3B's 38.19, per its model card.

r/LocalLLaMA liked the honesty: "gotta respect a lab that publishes their wins and their losses" (reply). An early tester found it "not so good in abstract reasoning and logic", and is trying agent harnesses next.

Heat: medium · 251K views, 29 posts (200K on the launch) · 492 pts on r/LocalLLaMA

10. A jailbroken PS5 runs Qwen 27B at about 20 tokens a second

Someone got the console's GPU running the model locally, cross-posted from r/LocalLLM.

Delight, and quant suspicion. The top reply: "we're gonna see someone daisy chaining PS5s now aren't we". Another: "It should be illegal to post stuff like this without the quant."

Heat: low · 9.9K views, 14 posts · 531 pts on r/LocalLLaMA