Google's Gemini 4 Carbon claimed to beat Opus 5.5 at 250% lower cost, but 3x slower
bindureddy · x · 2026-11-11
bindureddy claims Google's Gemini 4 Carbon is truly frontier-class: it outperforms Claude Opus 5.5 while being 250% cheaper than Opus and 500% cheaper than Fable, and "works in the real world," not just on benchmarks.
The attached comparison table shows Carbon scoring 83.5 overall (below Fable 5.2's 84.9 and GPT-6 Astra's 84.5), but leading on coding (91.0), data analysis (86.5) and research (92.5), at $2.024 per successful task vs Fable's $9.850 and Opus's $6.723.
The main drawback: it's about 3x slower than Opus even at low effort. If Google fixes speed while keeping the discount, the author argues it will overtake Anthropic. Available now on ChatLLM. Note this is third-party commentary, not an official Google release.
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