Google Unveils Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Drops the Flash Name

Google unveiled Gemini 4 Hydrogen today, retiring the Flash branding that tagged its previous release. The company says Hydrogen brings cutting-edge intelligence to everyone with speed and efficiency for everyday coding and agentic workflows, and bills it as a major standalone upgrade with significant leaps in speed and intelligence compared to Gemini 3.8 Flash, which launched September 2. The announcement follows this week's Carbon availability.

Hydrogen beats Argon on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at its default high thinking level, scoring 51 against Argon's 50, according to Google. At its highest xhigh thinking setting it reaches 54. The model supports native 1 million-token input and up to 1 million output tokens. In the Gemini app it sticks closer to a user's tone, format and rules, returns tables and visual breakdowns, and more frequently calls the right Connected Apps and skills, so email drafts, study guides, rewrites and documents come back ready to use on the first try. Free users get access through auto model selection when Hydrogen is the right model for the prompt, and the picker labels it Everyday help.

Google says the model meaningfully upgrades AI Mode in Search by reading intent better — handling multi-part questions, hard-to-understand typos and highly specific requests in a user's natural flow of thought. Search responses get more visual and surface a wider range of relevant links. In Google Antigravity, Hydrogen adds an Extra thinking tier, and the new Orchestrator switches dynamically between models like Carbon and Hydrogen inside a single session. Carbon can coordinate while Hydrogen powers worker and verifier agents that build and test changes across isolated workspaces at once, and Carbon can also offload routine steps to Hydrogen for the same quality at fewer tokens.

Developers pay $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. Hydrogen is available across all tiers of Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, Gemini for business, the Gemini app and Google Search, plus paid Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in Google Antigravity.