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Google has announced its latest AI model, Gemini 4 Hydrogen. The model replaces Gemini 3.8 Flash that most consumers will currently be using, with Google promising significant performance upgrades.

That's going to be most apparent in the Gemini app, where paid subscribers can move over to Hydrogen, which should be better at staying on task, following instructions and making for a better daily assistant. Those on the free AI tier will move to Hydrogen when needed, switching over from Flash-Lite.

It will sit alongside Gemini 4 Carbon and Gemini 4 Argon, which are designed for more complicated tasks and coding. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is for everything that you want to happen quickly.

While much of Gemini 4 Hydrogen's skills are aimed at developers - which is where the reports of higher performance, greater speed, multi-agent handling and lower hallucination rates are all promised - for consumers, one of the big changes will be to Google Search.

Gemini 4 Hydrogen will power AI Mode in Google Search moving forward. That should make it faster to get the results you want, with more accuracy. Google says that it's better at understanding exactly what you want, sidestepping things like typos and multi-part queries.

With Google now slipping from AI Overviews into AI Mode on many searches, Hydrogen will make these searches more visual, bringing in scannable responses to help your understanding. It will also be better at understanding natural language.

There's also the promise that more relevant links will be included. This is an area that's caused huge concern for publishers, with AI Mode generally answering the question from harvested information rather than sending users through to the source information that answers the query.

That's had a massive impact on the pages that publishers are serving up, but Google says that Hydrogen will provide more links. Whether that will see more clickthrough or not - especially if Gemini is better at answering the question - remains to be seen.

On top of this, Google says that Gemini 4 Hydrogen offers better security, keeping Gemini on task rather than it running off to do other things outside its permission sets. Equally, it’s more resilient to injection attacks.

Google Gemini 4 Hydrogen is available now and rolling out immediately.