Google opens up Gemini 4 Carbon; Perplexity CEO says it is "2.5x cheaper than Fable 5.2" per task

"Carbon is 2.5x cheaper than Fable 5.2 with similar capabilities on agentic research tasks," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas posted on Nov. 10, clarifying that he meant per task, not per token. A day after Anthropic shipped Fable 5.2, Google made Gemini 4 Carbon, which it had limited to cyber defenders two weeks ago, broadly available.

Per Google's blog, Carbon is available to all paying Gemini API developers and enterprises at Argon's introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Consumers need a Google AI Ultra subscription to use it in the Gemini app, AI Mode in Search and Antigravity. Google says Carbon ranks first on CursorBench 4.0, Perplexity's WANDR and Zapier's AutomationBench at more than 2x lower cost per task than the next best external model, and it previewed /swarm in Antigravity, which turns one prompt into a coordinated team of agents.

Early testers were mostly positive. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick said it is "useful to have an AI that thinks differently than Claude/GPT" and showed Carbon rebuilding a video clip in Three.js. Greg Isenberg said after seven days that successful shortcuts on Terminal-Bench fell to 0%, so "you can finally leave an agent alone mostly." Others said it still feels strongest at multimodal understanding and search rather than a leap in intelligence, and Pro subscribers complained it went to Ultra first.

Sundar Pichai shared a Carbon-built 3D game of a pelican biking around Google's campus, made with /swarm (about 2,800 likes). Google's Logan Kilpatrick added: "Carbon is a great model, but the team is still cooking."