Gemini 4 Carbon takes the top spot, and brags about cyber skills
Google released Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday, its new frontier model. A frontier model is a company's most advanced AI. Google says it brings 'significant gains' in coding, agentic tasks and cybersecurity. It was the top AI story on Hacker News, with 947 points and 760 comments.
Carbon is now first on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0, a popular ranking, ahead of Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra. But Ars Technica calls it 'essentially a slightly better version of Argon', and a model 'you can't use'. On Reddit, people question the new index: it adds private tests, and open models from China like Kimi and DeepSeek dropped. That is criticism, not proof.
Same day, Ars also found Google's AI gets cagey when asked who won the 2020 US election, but answers more directly outside the US.
Every new top model now sells better hacking skills as a feature. Good for defenders, yes. But the same skills help attackers, and October shows how fast that goes.
