On Tuesday, November 10, Google rolled out Gemini 4 Carbon, the most capable model in the Gemini 4 family so far. It’s sitting at #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, and it came out ahead on 15 of the 17 benchmarks Google published with the launch.
While the numbers are impressive - the thing I really look forward to with any model launch is when my X feed fills up with all the cool things people made. I love scrolling through and seeing the creativity that a new model unlocks in people.
Here are the ones I saved this time.
What people are building
A pelican biking around Google campus. This one is from Google itself. It’s a playable 3D game where a pelican rides a bike around the Mountain View campus, built by a group of subagents that modeled things in Blender, put the game together in Three.js, and checked their own renders along the way. You can play it in AI Studio.
Yonkers as a giant mech. Simon Willison asked for a Three.js animation where Yonkers stands up as a big mech and stomps around Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, using OpenStreetMap data. Not something I would have imagined up - but glad someone did!
Theme Park, 30 years later. Demis Hassabis showed Carbon reverse-engineering Theme Park, the game he built by hand back in 1993-94, adding a DeepMind-themed ride to it, and porting the whole thing to the web in one shot. Pretty crazy how different development looks now compared to what it used to be.
A whole production stack in about two days. AI for Success used Carbon for roughly 95% of the work behind a real website and newsletter: a Vercel to Cloudflare migration, cookieless analytics, bot detection, a custom Supabase backend, a dashboard, and all the technical SEO. It’s apparently in daily use now.
HackerTube, extended. Teddy Warner spent a weekend taking Andrej Karpathy’s HackerTube idea further. It filters your feed, swaps the thumbnails for mid-video frames, strips out the clutter, drops the ragebait, and grades creators. The before and after of the feed is worth a look.
This batch is more of a mix than usual. There’s the fun 3D stuff, and then there are people who used it to ship something they now rely on every day.
And mine: a marble run
Of course, I also had to take Carbon out for a spin - and one of my favourite use cases theses days (influenced heavily by my kids) is a marble run. My kids are obsessed with marble run videos (I wrote about this in the Argon post), so at this point making one is the first thing I do with any new model.
I’m far from done playing with this model. I also have a new Mermaid game in the works....this time it combines my childhood nostalgia of Math Blasters but with a Mermaid twist. It’s called Mermath, and I’m still actively iterating on it, but my kids have loved playing the first few levels so far (more to come on this once it’s done).
That’s it for this week. If you’ve made something with Carbon, send it my way. And if it’s a marble run, I have three small reviewers at home who will give you very honest feedback.
And we’re already behind. I wrote this post this morning and I’m sending it a few hours later than I meant to. In those few hours, Google launched Gemini 4 Hydrogen. So my feed is about to fill up all over again. The speed of AI right now is kinda wild.