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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised -- I thought Bard was terrible branding. It's all associations with Shakespeare and poetry and medieval England, and as much as I might personally enjoy those, it's extremely backwards-looking, with archaic connotations. Also it sounds close to "beard" -- hairy stuff.

Gemini sounds like the space program -- futuristic, a leap for mankind. It's got all the right emotional associations. It's a constellation, it's out in space, it's made of stars. Plus it contains "gem" which feels fancy, valuable, refined.

I'm not saying Gemini is the best name I've ever heard or even close to it, but it feels 100% appropriate, in a way that Bard does not.

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Interesting. I don’t like the name at all because it makes me think of people who take horoscopes seriously. You’re impression seems to be untainted by that which is nice

Same here, I think I'm more on your side which I guess goes to show how all over the map subjective reactions can be.

But first of all, I thought the whole idea of alphabet was a kind of cheeky way of telling the world you had a portfolio of projects, one for each letter, And B is for bard would be perfect, and Gemini is about as incompatible as it gets given that g is claimed.

I also find it bizarre to say that association with Shakespeare, or the association with whimsical poetic expression is in any sense a bad thing. It's a clean, simple, fun name that's remarkably short and surprisingly unclaimed. And I don't even strongly associate it specifically with Shakespeare, that's like a background association as far as I'm concerned.

I think perhaps the real talk here is that Bard was kind of an emergency response to chat GPT, but also people have some pretty specific and distinct experiences with Bard and have an idea of its quality, and Google just needs to turn the page on the perception of Bard.

The name bard is tainted by ridicule.

Besides that, personally I always thought it was a bad fit. It sounds old and outdated to those that do not know what the word means and wrong to those that do: a bard sings songs and maybe does poetry.

A bard does not help or assist you. A bard can be a creative person, but is generally not considered especially wise or knowledgeable. A bard is also always a man, which does not gel very well with modern sensibilities.

I can see why they dropped it.

Agreed. Also wondering what name it'll have next year.

"Bard" both makes lofty claims of being as good as Shakespeare and as nerdy as a being a reference to a D&D character class.

Who knows what Gemini is a reference to, other than mythology and astrology.

I keep waiting for someone to name theirs GePeTto... though perhaps it's funnier hearing the pronunciation of GPT as "Chat Jippity" on YouTube.

Funny, my mind goes to NASA and the Gemini program.

When I think of Gemini, I think of a digital twin, something which can work with what I have on Google, think like me, or do the things the way I do.

Bard was nice, too, but it was like another thing, separated from me. Gemini sounds more cooperative.

Ugh...such an Aquarian thing to say. /s

> I don’t like the name at all because it makes me think of people who take horoscopes seriously.

spoken like a true Sagittarius

Gem-in-eye? Ouch!

Also, Gemini was appropriate for the space program because (a) there were two astronauts in the capsule and (b) because of the constellation, "aiming for the stars" and all that. For the Google project however I can't come up with a plausible explanation - Google doesn't even try to give a reason for the name either.

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.

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.

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).

> Gemini sounds like the space program -- futuristic, a leap for mankind

80 years ago, sure.

> Gemini sounds like the space program

LOL, maybe I'm a bit jaded but Gemini sounds like some kind of cryptocurrency scam.

I hear echoes of astrology, personally, and not good ones.

With good reason! According to another commenter, when you search for the Gemini app, you get crypto apps before the Google one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316306

When I read new thread responses, I briefly thought that I wrote[1] your reply and was confused lol. Great minds think alike. I feel vindicated about my weird opinion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39306764

Ha, that's too funny -- I missed yours somehow or else I would have commented underneath it.

This. It creeps women out. It's difficult enough getting them to use an AI tool.

My wife commented on this when she saw it in Google News. Something about some dude in a medieval pub.

> It creeps women out. It's difficult enough getting them to use an AI tool.

Anecdotally, my wife routinely uses chatGPT for workout and recipe ideas.

She may be a bit of an outlier though, compared to others - she also runs GNU/Linux! :)

Bard doesn't creep women out. That's an extraordinary assumption you're making based on one anecdote. Not everything needs to be needlessly politicized.

The most popular TTRPG has Bard as a class and they (like every other class) is as gender-neutral as you can get.

The alliteration beauty of Google Gemini cannot be denied.

Only if you pronounce it with a hard G, like in GIF.

Or have I been mispronouncing ‘Google’ all this time?

We all say J-oogle, but only when you're not around.

Great, now its not fun anymore.

jif?

I think alliteration applies to pronunciation, not orthography. For example, "ceaseless sun" is an alliteration even though it is spelled with both C and S. I wonder if there is a word for the orthographic counterpart, which you describe here (and which I note in another comment, as the benefit of both starting with G).

Gemini as a zodiac sign: "Smart, passionate, and dynamic, Gemini is characterized by the Twins, Castor and Pollux, and is known for having two different sides they can display to the world. Expert communicators, Gemini is the chameleon of the Zodiac"

Which is pretty on the nose for an AI project. A chameleon with two different sides (good/evil?) and expert communicator

Why not Delphi? Isn't that more like what they are trying to create, an Oracle? And it's like HAL, one step ahead of IBM. Is Delphi just too on-the-nose? Yes, it is also a programming environment, I have many fond memories of Borland Delphi.

> Gemini sounds like the space program

That isn't at all the association I have with that word. I think of the astrological sign instead, so to me the association is pseudoscience and a hint of being bipolar.

This sort of thing is part of what makes naming things difficult. You can't count on any name having the same connotations to everyone.

even though i liked Bard, it is only one (extra) letter away from being the word "bad". "Bard" is cooler imo but "Gemini" starts with "G", has "gem" (a rare, valuable thing) in it, and sounds pretty. Personally i don't care at all either way though.

It's a hint about how to use it if you want to circumvent the censorship.

Though I agree bard isn't the best name, gemini is a worse name.

Bard has connotations, but by it's self it makes one think of a person that talks well.

WTF is gemini? It is a twin, but this is a singular product. Beyond that it's just generic. It doesn't tell you what it does at all.

I read Gemini as twins, with the user and the AI making a pair.

Works for me.

Not with regular people. Bard is just "old" to them.

Think of the syllables. Copilot. Gemini. They need to be close to the market leader on a subconscious level.

When the competition is called "ChatGPT", maybe the naming isn't as important to normal people as we think?

Microsoft is the competition. ChatGPT has been embraced and extended.

Big idea but maybe they should have just named it Google

They kind of didn't name their OK Google assistant anything other than "Assistant". What about ChatGooglePT?

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