From The Decoder: >In April 2023, Alphabet announced the merger of its two AI units, Google Brain and Deepmind. The resulting Google Deepmind was to focus on developing large multimodal AI models. It was a big move that showed how much pressure Google was under due to the massive success of ChatGPT. Jeff Dean, head of Google Brain until the merger with Deepmind, became the new merger's chief scientist, with a direct line to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Dean now explains that the name Gemini, Latin for "twin," is directly related to the merger.

From Jeff Dean's Twitter:

>Gemini is Latin for "twins".

>The Gemini effort came about because we had different teams working on language modeling, and we knew we wanted to start to work together. The twins are the folks in the legacy Brain team (many from the PaLM/PaLM-2 effort) and the legacy DeepMind team (many from the Chinchilla effort) that started to work together on the ambitious multimodal model project we called Gemini, eventually joined by many people from all across Google. Gemini was also was the Nasa project that was the bridge to the moon between the Mercury and Apollo programs.

The Decoder article - https://the-decoder.com/how-googles-gemini-ai-model-got-its-...

Jeff Dean's Twitter Post - https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1733580264859926941

Bicameral would have been better, IMO

It's more on the nose but probably less right from a marketing perspective.

It is funny how there is all this elaborate discussion here when it was just corporate officers jerking each other off all along. Occam’s razor.

During Project Gemini, it was pronounced it Gem-in-ee.

https://youtu.be/JeAUx6-vSmc?feature=shared

Which is closer to the proper Latin pronunciation (which would have a hard G although ecclesiastical Latin would have a soft G).

I mean it makes sense to me. The AI is your digital assistant. It's a relationship between two minds, man and machine.

I see that angle, but those two things are complementary, not identical. It's not a clone of me — it's something that I ask questions of because I don't know the answer. If it were pitched as a bot that would draft email responses for me automatically, then maybe I would see it fitting better as my 'twin'.

> it's something that I ask questions of because I don't know the answer

I think you're reading too much into what a twin is. It's not a copy! Real-life twins ask each other questions all the time, because just because one of them learns something doesn't mean the other one automatically learns it too via mind-meld.

I'm not saying all twins are identical. But they are all of the same species. What I want in an assistant is that it is very different from me. It has perfect memory and knows lots of things that I don't know.

You're using an overly strict definition of the word and over-interpreting it to boot. Consider this definition:

> something containing or consisting of two matching or corresponding parts.

It sounds like you're thinking of the adjective form of the word, which is why you are thinking of a much broader definition. I was using the noun form, since Gemini are noun twins.

If we were talking about the word "twins" in the abstract, the broader definition might make sense. But we aren't — we're talking about Gemini. If that conjures up general notions of "matched-ness" for you, that's great. When I think about Gemini, I think about mythological twins. I don't think about corresponding parts that complement each other.

For a product name to be successful, it should appeal to a wide range of people. If I'm way out in left field on this one, perhaps they've found a great name. But I would point out that my comment, which is critical of the name change, is the very first comment in the entire thread. I would take that as evidence that most people don't see the name and think "oh, it's like complementary items, like my brain and the AI".

To be clear, I was shocked to see this comment above all substantive discussion of the new release. I would have thought it would have been buried under examples of ways in which Ultra is better/worse than some other LLM.

> For a product name to be successful, it should appeal to a wide range of people.

Honestly, Google is called "Google". ChatGPT is called "ChatGPT". Maybe it'll be a joke, maybe people won't think about what they're calling it after 30 seconds.

This conversation is taking itself a bit too seriously for what's drifting into Pepsi logo gravitational pull territory, though.

> But I would point out that my comment, which is critical of the name change, is the very first comment in the entire thread.

Sure. Everyone has an opinion on what color the bike shed should be, too.