Simon Willison’s Weblog
Gemini 4 Carbon was announced two weeks ago for "a subset of cyber defenders", but today it's available to everyone else .
This is Google's best ever Gemini, priced at $2/million input and $10/million output at launch (that's GPT-6.1 Sol / Claude Sonnet 5.5 prices) but scheduled to double in price to $4/$20 on December 1st (same as Opus 5.5).
Here are three pelicans for the low, medium and high thinking efforts (it defaults to medium). This is the pelican I got for high:
Gemini pelicans have all been great for a while now, so I also tested it out using Google's Antigravity IDE with a prompt I first tried with Claude Fable 5.2 yesterday :
Make a three js animation where yonkers stands up as a big mech (cool stand up motion) and stomps around manhattan and queens and Brooklyn, use openstreetmap mapping data
Here's the HTML result (I had to prompt "build that into a standalone HTML file" to get a version with no external dependencies). I then screen-captured that as a video:
Update : Huh, just saw this on YouTube (and tweeted by Sundar Pichai ):
Using Google Antigravity’s /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game where you explore Google’s Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike — coordinating subagents to model 3D assets in Blender from Omni and Nano Banana references, build the browser game in Three.js with WebGL shaders, and pair procedural Web Audio sound effects with Lyria music.
Here's the playable version in AI Studio.
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This is a beat by Simon Willison, posted on 10th November 2026 .
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