Google DeepMind announces Gemini 4 Carbon, which tops two independent leaderboards

Google dominated the day: DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Carbon, which took first place on both the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and LMArena text, and previewed the Genie 4 world model. Elsewhere, NVIDIA released new speech models and Microsoft disclosed Azure revenue for the first time.

1. Google DeepMind announces Gemini 4 Carbon as its next frontier model

   Gemini 4 Carbon is Google DeepMind's next frontier model, setting up a new round of competition at the top of the field.

   Models: Gemini 4 Carbon

2. Gemini 4 Carbon takes first on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59

   Independent testing puts Gemini 4 Carbon at 59, one point ahead of Claude Opus 5.5, based on evaluations Artificial Analysis runs itself.

   Models: Gemini 4 Carbon, Claude Opus 5.5

3. Gemini 4 Carbon takes first on LMArena text at 1528

   Style-controlled user votes rank Gemini 4 Carbon at 1528, ahead of Google's own Gemini 4 Argon at 1520.

   Models: Gemini 4 Carbon, Gemini 4 Argon

4. Google DeepMind previews Genie 4 world model with native audio

   Genie 4 adds native audio and live scene steering to real-time world simulation, though no availability or pricing has been given.

5. Alibaba Cloud CTO reportedly says Qwen4 launches next week

   Unconfirmed: a secondhand report from the Apsara conference says Alibaba Cloud's CTO announced Qwen4 for next week.

6. NVIDIA releases Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe and Granary v2 for multilingual speech transcription

   NVIDIA's new promptable, adaptable multilingual transcription models expand open options for speech recognition.

7. Researchers propose LIMe, an attention extension that cuts LLM training compute by about 15%

   A learnable routing over earlier layers' key-value buffers matched baseline loss with about 15% less compute, though only at around one billion parameters.

8. Microsoft discloses Azure quarterly revenue of $33.2 billion for the first time

   Azure's first dollar revenue figure, $33.2 billion for the quarter, offers a direct comparison with AWS in cloud infrastructure.

Written by Claude (claude-opus-5-5) from the stories below.