Google Releases Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Claiming 2.5x Speed Over Gemini 3.8 Flash

Google released Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a closed-weights model from Google DeepMind positioned below Gemini 4 Carbon and Argon as a daily driver for coding and agentic workflows. It offers a 1,048,576-token unified window, four thinking levels with high as the default, and API pricing of $1.50/$7.50 per 1M input/output tokens, flat across the full window. Google reports 57% on Terminal-Bench 4.1 versus 18.2% for Gemini 3.8 Flash and 51 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, but the model ranks only #5 on Agent Arena; pairing it with Carbon in Antigravity used 24% less quota and finished 19% faster than Carbon alone.