Gemini 4 Argon tops one coding benchmark in Google's own table but is invite only for now. GPT-6.1 Sol's speed complaints draw a promised fix from OpenAI's Codex team. Two more stories inside.
Google announced Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday, and its own table has the model beating GPT-6 Astra and Claude on one coding test — but nobody outside an invited group of "trusted cyber defenders" can use it yet. GPT-6.1 Sol users are complaining it runs at a crawl; a member of OpenAI's Codex team says capacity is the problem and a fix is coming within hours. Factory's CEO fired his own board adviser on X on Wednesday, accusing him of leaking to rival Cognition — the adviser says he quit. And GitHub's HydraFusion, a system that routes a coding task between models instead of picking one, has expanded from the Copilot CLI into VS Code itself.
What changed this week #
Google announces Gemini 4 Argon, invite only for now
Google announced Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday and says it's "rolling out to a set of trusted cyber defenders through our Fairwind Program," not to developers. It lists at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, matching OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol and Anthropic's Sonnet 5.5, doubling to $4/$20 once the introductory period ends. Google's own table has Argon setting "a new state of the art on DeepSWE v1.1," a real-world software-engineering benchmark, at 77.9%. The same table has Opus 5.5 ahead on Terminal-bench 4.0 and GPT-6 Astra ahead on FrontierSWE v2. Artificial Analysis, an independent benchmarking firm, scored it 53 on its Intelligence Index at high effort, 8th of 223 models tracked, at $1.99 per task. Access starts "with paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers," with no date given. You can read about Argon today. You can't use it.
OpenAI promises a fix after GPT-6.1 Sol users report a crawl
OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol, shipped Tuesday, is drawing complaints of a crawl. A 1,053-point r/codex thread pegs it in Codex at "20 tokens per second," a user's reading under load. Tibo Sottiaux, a member of OpenAI's Codex team, said on X that OpenAI had added capacity and speed should improve "in the coming hours," reaching "almost twice the speed compared to what we served yesterday." Artificial Analysis, testing the API at medium effort, measures 57 tokens per second. Check Codex again before planning around it.
Factory fires its board adviser, alleging he leaked to Cognition
Factory and Cognition, the maker of Devin, both build AI coding agents. Factory CEO Matan Grinberg said on X Wednesday he fired board adviser Chris Degnan, alleging Degnan "was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor," Cognition. Degnan announced he'd joined Cognition as chief revenue officer and says he resigned, not was fired. Cognition's CEO denied the leak claim. Grinberg says "We do not know the extent of the information he shared." Treat it as an unproven accusation.
GitHub expands HydraFusion, its multi-model picker, to VS Code
GitHub's HydraFusion, a Copilot CLI preview three weeks ago, is now in VS Code and the Copilot app, behind a flag. It isn't one model; it's three modes: one model alone, a cheap model drafting with escalation on a quality gate, or a second model critiquing before the first revises. You'll need VS Code 1.140 or later, or Insiders, plus chat.copilot.hydraFusion.enabled. Flip it if you're already a Copilot user.
Also worth your time #
- DeepSeek Harness, DeepSeek's agent harness, gets a desktop app for macOS and Windows in its v0.2 preview, with the dsh command bundled so you don't need Node or pnpm (GitHub)
- livenerf, a daily benchmark tracking whether Opus 5.5 quietly got worse, is at day 7 of 30; its first possible verdict is around October 24 (GitHub)
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