Google's Gemini 4 Argon Beats Opus 5.5 And GPT-6 Astra At Coding, But You Can't Use It Yet

Today's AI news: Google unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, scoring 77.9% on DeepSWE against Opus 5.5's 74.2% and GPT-6 Astra's 74.1%, with a 1M-token output limit, rolling out first to cyber defenders via the Fairwind Program. OpenAI's Ultrafast tier runs GPT-6 Astra up to 8x faster in Codex, on the new $500-a-month Pro 500 plan. The White House launched America.gov, an AI portal to federal services built on Gemini and Grok. Google DeepMind's SynthID Bio made the first watermarked AI-designed proteins that still work. And AMD is buying Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion. Chapters: 0:00 Today's AI News 0:26 Gemini 4 Argon 1:17 Codex Ultrafast 1:53 America.gov AI Portal 2:29 SynthID Bio Proteins 3:10 World Labs Joins AMD Blend Roundup 2026-09-30 https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2105388084154056939 https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2105387952478277979 https://x.com/Google/status/2105388143902175529 https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2105388054274080946 https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2104996045482778973 https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/2104937328342925508 https://x.com/wallstengine/status/2104947723149668480 https://x.com/pushmeet/status/2105343729619927236 https://x.com/theworldlabs/status/2104665621120311465 Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, and it's retaken the lead on coding benchmarks. OpenAI's Ultrafast mode runs Astra eight times faster for 500 dollars a month, the White House has launched an AI front door to government, DeepMind has watermarked AI-designed proteins, and AMD is buying World Labs for 8.2 billion. Here's today's AI news. Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, its new frontier model, built for coding, enterprise knowledge work and cybersecurity defence. On Google's own numbers it retakes the lead. On the DeepSWE coding benchmark it scores 77.9 percent, ahead of Claude Opus 5.5 at 74.2 and GPT-6 Astra at 74.1, and on Zapier's AutomationBench it's nearly nine points clear of Opus. It doesn't win everything: Opus still leads on Terminal-Bench. Argon can also write up to a million tokens in a single response, up from 64,000 for previous Gemini models. The catch is access. It's rolling out first to cyber defenders through Google's Fairwind Program, with wider release as soon as possible. Introductory pricing is 2 dollars in and 10 out per million tokens, rising to 4 and 20 later. OpenAI's other DevDay launch was all about speed. Ultrafast is a premium tier for GPT-6 Astra, and in Codex it runs up to eight times faster than standard Astra and four times faster than Astra Fast, at around 300 tokens per second. In the API it's up to six times faster, at six times the price. To get it in ChatGPT you'll need Enterprise or the new Pro 500 plan, which costs 500 dollars a month and gives 25 times the usage of Plus. Reports say the 200 dollar Pro plan's limits have been cut at the same time. The White House has launched America.gov, an AI-powered front door to the federal government, built on Google's Gemini and xAI's Grok. Instead of hunting through roughly 29,000 government websites, you just describe what you need, from Medicare eligibility and passports to Social Security, veterans' care and business registration, and it only answers from official sources. For now it answers questions and points you to the right service. The launch demo showed a newlywed changing their name across every agency with just one form - that kind of cross-agency paperwork is planned for 2027. Google DeepMind has made the first AI-designed proteins that carry a watermark and still work. SynthID Bio subtly steers which amino acids a model chooses, leaving a hidden signal in the sequence without changing how the protein folds or functions. It works with ProteinMPNN for sequences and a fine-tuned AlphaFold 3 for structures. In the lab, watermarked binders designed against targets including the COVID spike protein and the cancer target PD-L1 still bound, and the watermark survived synthesis. The goal is biosecurity, letting DNA synthesis companies and regulators trace where an AI-designed protein came from. AMD is buying Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for 8.2 billion dollars in stock. World Labs builds spatial intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D worlds from text, images and video, along with tools for robot learning and simulation. Li, the ImageNet pioneer, becomes AMD's executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Lisa Su. World Labs says getting closer to the hardware is how you scale physical AI. It's AMD's second-biggest deal ever, after Xilinx, and should close by the end of the year.