Sundar Pichai shares a Gemini 4 Argon video of a pelican riding a bike drawn with Fourier epicycles

Context

This is Google's CEO promoting a demo of Google's own model, so it is promotional. The video he quotes was posted by fofr on October 13, the day Google launched Gemini 4 Argon, which the Oct 13 deck already covers. Fofr's post says the video was made by Argon, with time synced music from Google's Lyria 3.5 model prompted by Argon.

Deep dive

On October 14, Sundar Pichai quoted a video and wrote that he had watched it a few times, especially to the end, and that the creativity in the prompting and the model is awesome to see.

The quoted post, by fofr on October 13, says Argon has an amazing natural understanding of the world and can do many things from first principles. It shows a pelican riding a bike drawn using Fourier epicycles, a technique that traces a shape with chains of rotating circles. According to fofr, the video was made by Argon, and the music, time synced to the animation, came from Google's Lyria 3.5 model prompted by Argon. Fofr's post had about 823,000 views when checked.

A pelican riding a bicycle is a long running informal test for new models, popularized by developer Simon Willison, in which people ask for a drawing of that scene to see how well a model handles code and spatial layout. Fofr's version adds a mathematical twist, since Fourier epicycles require the model to work out the math of the curves rather than simply draw them.

The demo fits Google's broader pitch for Gemini 4 Argon, which it released globally on October 13. That launch is covered as story 08 in the October 13 deck, along with posts from Google DeepMind, Cursor and Artificial Analysis.

Pichai's post is an endorsement rather than new information about the model, and the video is a single demo, so it says more about Google's marketing push than about how consistently Argon performs.

What to expect next

Watch whether Argon's creative and coding demos translate into lasting gains on independent leaderboards and in developer adoption over the coming weeks.

Also watch how Google packages Argon with its other models such as Lyria for music, since demos that chain several Google models together suggest where it wants to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic on creative tools, and whether fofr's demo prompts become a common test for rival models.