How Does Gemini 4 Carbon Compare With Opus 5.5?

Alexander Wissner-Gross says Gemini 4 Carbon looks a little like Opus 5.5. If the posted price and the capability are accurate, Gemini for Carbon moves the frontier up and to the left, toward better performance at lower cost.

The model has not been released yet, and it is entirely possible that Google is dumping cheap tokens or subsidizing the price. The picture stays hard to know until the model is generally available. At the earlier Gemini for Carbon launch, the podcast had hand-wringing over whether the model was really on the frontier. With cost on one axis and performance on the other, the gap is plain: if Gemini 4 Carbon did not exist, a big gap would sit in the Pareto frontier.

A chart of models by domain shows the frontier is spiky. Law is anemic. Biology, cyber, alignment, and material science show up as dimensions of intelligence, where past spider charts on the podcast usually showed emotional intelligence and quantitative intelligence.