Argon aims to return Google to the frontier

Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to the 5,879 new readers who joined us yesterday. Google spent most of 2026 on the sidelines of the frontier, with a scrapped Gemini 3.5 Pro and a steady stream of Flash models filling a widening gap.

Gemini 4 Argon is the company’s long-awaited answer, and the early leaderboards show significant progress. There’s just one catch — you probably can’t use it yet.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Gemini 4 Argon looks to return Google to the frontier

• Nate’s Notebook: When judgment gets cheap

• How (and why) to set up Meta’s Muse Desktop

• Behind the scenes at the White House’s big AI day

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

🚀 Gemini 4 Argon looks to return Google to the frontier

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google just unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, the company’s new frontier model that tops both GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 on 13 of 19 benchmarks in Google’s testing, though it’s rolling out only to select vetted cybersecurity teams.

The details:

• Argon debuted at No. 1 on Arena’s text leaderboard and scored a 53 on AA’s Intelligence Index, sitting behind just 5.5 Opus and tying 5.1 Fable and Astra.

• The model hit a leading 77.9% on DeepSWE (real-world coding), and also topped tests for knowledge work, long documents, and reading charts and video.

• Google hasn’t put a date on the wider rollout, but API pricing starts at $2/$10 per million tokens in/out, rising to $4/$20 once the promo window closes.

• Bloomberg reported internal doubts about Argon’s coding, with internal sources saying it tests well but falls short in real work — a claim Google rejected.

Why it matters: Is Google back? After Gemini 3 put it near the front of the pack last November, 2026 has been a mess — a scrapped 3.5 Pro and months without a model bigger than the Flash line. Argon’s numbers put Google back in the frontier talks, but we need to see how it runs in a broader rollout before declaring this a comeback story.

TOGETHER WITH SLACK FROM SALESFORCE

📊 What’s the ROI of running work in Slack?

The Rundown: Fragmented tools and slow handoffs cost more than most teams realize. A Forrester Consulting study quantified it, and for a composite enterprise, the result was 312% ROI over three years, $38.6M net present value, and payback in under 6 months.

This ROI calculator lets you:

• Plug in your team size and tool stack to see projected savings

• See efficiency gains behind Forrester’s findings, including a 15% sales win-rate uplift

• Benchmark your organization against a real, independently verified study

Calculate your ROI.

NATE’S NOTEBOOK

🧠 Nate’s Notebook: When judgment gets cheap

Nate: Every week, my feed tells me ten things will change everything. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between something kinda cool and something very significant. But once in a while, we get a model like TypeSafe’s Jev, a totally different paradigm.
LLMs write essays. Jev only fills in the bubbles: pick one option, give a score, answer yes or no, each with a confidence number. That’s why it’s nearly instant and absurdly cheap.
Jev is an awesome lesson in hyper-delegation: chunking work into its most discrete pieces. Inbox sorting is the classic case. The exciting one is investors. Use a smart model like Fable or Astra to codify your thesis into a scorecard, and Jev opens the door for you to run your evaluation playbook at a scale that has not yet been very practical.
Jev also shows how hard it is to keep up, and it’s even harder to think of relevant personal use. You need to use AI to help you sort this out. My new Why Does This Matter skill researches a launch for you, including where it falls short, and teaches it first.
Try using it on Jev. After that, run the skill every time a launch makes you feel behind.

AI TRAINING

🖥️ How (and why) to set up Meta’s Muse Desktop

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to set up Meta Muse on your desktop and how it can help you do more than the phone app.

Step-by-step:

1. Download and install Muse for Mac, then sign in and go through the setup wizard, reviewing each local-app permission. We recommend setting most to read-only

2. In Settings, open Connectors and add some apps you use

3. Check the access requested by each connector and start with lower levels until you trust Muse. For example, we set our Gmail access to read-only

4. Now, give Muse a task like: “I want to sell my computer monitor. Check local marketplace listings every day for similar HP monitors and log them to a spreadsheet so I can learn to build the best listing”

Pro tip: Pair Muse with the iPhone app and try asking it to do a task that uses your Mac.

PRESENTED BY WIZ

💻 A practical framework for AI threat readiness

The Rundown: As attackers use AI to identify vulnerabilities and accelerate exploitation, security teams need operational strategies that keep pace. Wiz’s AI Threat Readiness Playbook provides a four-pillar framework security leaders can use to strengthen programs and prepare for AI-enabled threats.

Learn how to:

• Reduce critical attack surface exposure

• Improve zero-day response and remediation

• Strengthen application security with AI-assisted analysis

• Modernize detection and response using AI-driven workflows

Get the Playbook.

GOVERNMENT AI

🏛️ Behind the scenes at the White House’s big AI day

Image source: The Rundown / Nick Adams

The Rundown: The Rundown was on the ground at Tuesday’s White House AI event, where the government’s new AI platform launched, and top tech leaders signed a new “Super Intelligence” accord. Our own Nick Adams was in the room and gave us the inside scoop on the atmosphere, the panel, and what stood out.

Zach: What did it feel like inside, compared with what people saw on the livestream?

Nick: The event itself was relaxed, positive, and had an open atmosphere. There was a diverse range of attendees, both from the speaker side and the crowd. I was surprised to see Tim Robbins as one of the hosts, and at one point he led the group through one of his “positive mentality” exercises. I think the main thing people may not experience just from watching online is how optimistic the admin and key leaders are in regard to AI and its supporting industries.

Zach: Did the day lean more toward AI safety or the buildout?

Nick: The main theme centered on the importance of the U.S. leading AI development, and the President indicated that he felt there would be no “second place” in AI development. Regarding safety, Vice President J.D. Vance said that there are already laws from the FTC and similar agencies requiring companies to develop products with user safety in mind, and that government regulation would hinder progress.

Zach: What was it like watching the big names share a stage? How did they seem to get along?

Nick: I was in the room with Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and (Anthropic co-founder) Tom Brown as they spoke about the ‘Golden Age of AI.’ The trio spoke highly of each other and their initiatives, and Jensen definitely kept the humor alive throughout the conversation. As someone who is a daily user of the tech and very hopeful for the continued development of more capable tools, it was really great to hear how invested all of these leaders were in the human-first potential of what they’re building.

QUICK HITS

COMMUNITY AI WORKFLOW OF THE DAY

▸ Matt built an AI video editor for property listings

Today’s workflow comes from reader Matt Aromando:

“I built a website that turns property photos, architectural renderings, or even just an address into cinematic property videos. I’m a civil engineer and photographer/videographer, not a software developer, so I used ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude Code to help build the site and work through problems as they came up.

Much of the process involved translating the way I would personally edit a real estate video into usable software. For example, kitchen and living room shots should usually stay together and have longer durations, bedrooms should stay near their bathrooms, an opening shot should feel different from a detail shot, and every clip should include some movement so the result does not feel like a generic slideshow.

I used AI to turn those editing principles into actual logic for the site. The system analyzes and organizes the images, builds a storyboard, ranks scenes to decide which ones to use, creates prompts for video models, generates the clips, and assembles everything into a finished video.”

See Matt’s full workflow here. How do you use AI? Tell us for a chance to be featured.

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🔵 Dot – OpenAI’s new always-on agent taking on Meta’s Muse

• 🎨 Ideogram 4.5 – New image editing AI that holds up through repeated changes

• 🗣️ Mercury Voice – Inception’s cheap, speedy reasoning model for voice agents

• 🎬 Utopai X – MiniMax-based video AI, ranking #2 on text-to-video leaderboard

📰 Everything else in AI today

Google Cloud launched Advent of Agents Season 3, featuring 31 days of hands-on tutorials on building and securing AI agents in production with Gemini and ADK — no sign-in or paywall.*

OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, and xAI signed a voluntary White House “Superintelligence Accord” to police their top models with outside auditors.

The Pentagon’s Pete Hegseth introduced Project Meridian, a 120-day hunt for futuristic weapons troops could need “from under the Earth to beyond the moon,” with Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey as co-leads.

DoorDash launched a connector that lets companies’ AI agents handle team lunches and office snack runs, coming alongside a new AI-powered app for its delivery couriers.

AI avatar startup HeyGen released its first all-purpose video model for businesses, built on Chinese lab MiniMax’s H3 and priced at a penny per second of video with sound.

*Sponsored Listing

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI connects the dots on always-on agents

• Read our last Tech newsletter: SpaceX’s $15B megarocket finally delivers

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Agility’s new ‘safer’ humanoid

• Today’s AI tool guide: How (and why) to set up Meta’s Muse Desktop

• RSVP to next workshop on Oct. 7: Build and deliver a real AI consulting project

See you soon,

Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — the humans behind The Rundown