Google employees question Gemini 4 Argon's real-world coding
Google shipped its return to the frontier today — and its own people are already arguing about how far ahead it actually is. Plus a public spying accusation between two coding-agent rivals, and another mega-round for AI in hardware design.
Some Google employees say Gemini 4 Argon tops the benchmarks but struggles with real-world coding — and Google is disputing that characterization. Bloomberg reported Wednesday that employees with direct access to the model describe its coding abilities as uneven, with one person saying it is not adept at front-end design, and two people familiar with the matter saying Argon appears to have been shaped by benchmark optimization at the expense of product quality. Google responded that it "would be inaccurate to say that Gemini 4 is underperforming" in areas such as coding, pointed to DeepMind head Koray Kavukcuoglu's remark that he has "the utmost trust in the team," and an employee familiar with the model's development cited a "large consensus" internally that Argon is at the frontier. The report landed hours after the launch and pared Alphabet's intraday gains from more than 2 percent to about half a percent. The timing is what makes this more than an internal squabble: Argon is not going to the public at all yet — it starts with trusted cyber defenders through the Fairwind program, with pre-release evaluations running alongside the US government — and a gated rollout reads very differently when the people who built the model are split on how well it codes. We traced the long road to this launch earlier — DeepMind says Gemini 4 is in post-training, eyeing an early launch.
Factory's CEO publicly accused his departing board advisor of taking confidential information to Cognition. Matan Grinberg posted on X that he fired Chris Degnan from his board advisor role, alleging that for weeks Degnan sat in Factory board meetings while "confiding with executives of our largest competitor" under confidentiality obligations; Degnan, who announced a chief revenue officer role at Cognition hours later, says he resigned first and that Cognition "has never asked about information on Factory, nor would I ever give it." The feud drew in investors on both sides within hours: Khosla Ventures, which backs both companies, called Grinberg "a struggling second tier competitor" showing desperation, Factory supporter Keith Rabois called sitting for a competitor interview while holding board-level information "absolutely insane," and Cognition CEO Scott Wu said his team would never collect competitor information under the table. Business Insider additionally reported Grinberg's allegation that Cognition employees faked job interviews at Factory to gain access to internal information — none of it proven, but it lands against a reported DOJ probe into venture partners sitting on competitors' boards, with Factory valued at $5 billion and Cognition at $48 billion. We covered the money side last year — Factory raises $200M at a $5B valuation, tripling in five months.
Flow Engineering raised a $50 million Series B at a $750 million valuation to put AI agents inside hardware design. The round was co-led by Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners and Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, with Sequoia Capital — which led the Series A last October — participating and Roelof Botha joining the board as an individual investor. The three-year-old San Francisco startup sells agents that keep CAD drawings automatically aligned with product requirements, simulation results and test data, pitching hardware iteration as fast as software iteration; it names Anduril, Rivian, Joby Aviation and Stoke Space as customers, and says Rivian's internal usage grew from 40 to 1,500 users in seven months. Hardware is the least demo-friendly place to deploy AI — nothing forgives a misaligned drawing — so this round is a bet that alignment, not generation, is the part of the workflow enterprises will pay for.
What to watch: whether Google puts a date on public Argon access — and whether the Factory-Cognition feud turns into an exhibit in the board-seat probe.
If Google's own engineers can't agree Argon is a leap, do you trust the benchmark chart or want a week with the model first? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Bloomberg — Google grapples with employee skepticism about its new Gemini model · Google — Gemini 4 Argon announcement · Investing.com — Alphabet stock slips on internal Gemini report · TechCrunch — Factory CEO accuses his board advisor of spying for Cognition · Business Insider — Factory and Cognition feud over a top hire · TechCrunch — Flow Engineering's $750M round · Flow Engineering — Series B announcement
