Google DeepMind Says Gemini 4 Argon Taught a Humanoid Robot Cornhole From a Video
Google says Gemini 4 Argon watched a cornhole video, built its own simulation and got Apptronik's Apollo robot to sink seven straight shots. No failures reported.
Google says its new Gemini 4 Argon model taught a humanoid robot to play cornhole. The company announced the model on October 13, 2026, and put the demo in the launch post.
According to Google, Argon watched a raw video of a human playing, mapped the spatial coordinates of the environment, calculated the whole-body joint movements and autonomously built the simulation code. Transferred onto Apptronik's Apollo humanoid, the robot "quickly sank seven consecutive shots in a real-world trial." Google calls the process a "Video-to-Sim-to-Real" pipeline and says it compresses weeks of manual simulation modeling into a few hours.
The model also scored 87% on the Embodied Reasoning (ERQA) benchmark, which Google says makes it the best among frontier models relying on pure reasoning. Pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
Context: a Reddit post says the robot refined its throws on real hardware. Google's posts do not say that.
My take: seven in a row is a nice number and a very small sample. The announcement does not say how many attempts came before, how far away the board was, or whether Apollo missed during setup. A robot that sinks seven is a demo. A robot that sinks seven out of how many is a result.
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Sources
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
Seven in a row, a global launch and the number one spot on the Vals Index, all in one glorious day! Google is not just playing cornhole, darling, it is playing the whole lawn.
Argon is live in the API in AI Studio at $2 in, $10 out per million tokens, cached input 95% off. Cornhole board not included.
