In this age of constant change, I am grateful that at least I can still rely on Google for confusing, ever-changing product names.
In this age of constant change, I am grateful that at least I can still rely on Google for confusing, ever-changing product names.
They should at least tell us the atomic mass they're using.
If it's based on carbon-14 it will lose half its model weights in 5,730 years; if it's based on carbon-12, it's a stable release.
By the way things are going in the industry, I think Gemini 4 Carbon's lead will only persist for the half-life of Francium-223.
Depends. If it is uranium, the lead will only continue to increase.
holy shit lmao
Is Gmail still in beta?
I think it's called Google Wave nowadays. Wait ...
RIP Google Inbox
It was only in beta for 5 years. 17 years ago.
Next version: Gemini Tokyo Drift
Gemini 4 Cabron
Vin Diesel pulls up in an OpenAI NASCAR with Sam Altman in the passenger seat, tells us we're all family and transforms in to Optimus prime, a mobile data center
(Dario is later found in the trunk ...)
Gemini Fox on Socks on Knox on Box.
Gemini: Capricorn
Gemini: doomsday
Gemini: It's Morbin' Time
"Introducing Gemini One, the sequel to Gemini 4."
Followed naturally by Gemini Series S and Gemini Series X.
In all seriousness, if Google must continue gambling on pre-train runs, at least have a useful naming scheme. Like the month it was post-trained and the parameter count. At least that’d provide some insight.
Gemini 2T 10/26, bit of a mouthful but is it truly that much worse?
Bold of you to assume it will still be called Gemini
Gemini - Alignment Drift
Gemini Super
Gemini XP
Gemini Hit Pursuit 2
How is this any different than terra, sol etc or leopard, yosemite etc, or model x, y, 3, s ..
Don't know about the leopard and model x, but at least in the case of OpenAI luna > Terra > Sol > Astra is a pretty obvious size progression.
But I come from a latin language background, so maybe I'm a bit biased there.
At the risk of taking a geocentric position, my gut feel is Terra -> Luna -> Sol -> Astra. Sorting algorithm is distance from observer.
Size wise Astra is not categorically bigger than Sol, both in absolute terms and the observed size.
Astra is latin for "stars", so basically the Galaxy (or Universe as a whole) which is categorically bigger than Sol, the sun, a single star.
The naming makes perfect sense to me, the sorting algorithm is size, both for the names and for the models themselves. Smaller things represent smaller models, and vice versa.
> the Galaxy (or Universe as a whole) which is categorically bigger than Sol, the sun, a single star.
I would need to be a complete moron to argue with this. Humor me, however. My Latin skills end at remembering "Romani Ite Domum" and English is not my first language.
My layman reading of the names: there is one Terra, one Luna and one Sol => "Astra" is singular.
Now that I googled it, I understand that "Astra" literally means the "Stars" category. I would not have thought that they called a single star "Astrum". On the other hand, I am not sure if it means "Galaxy" in modern sense, but we're entering Roman Astronomy territory, where I am even less knowledgeable than in the language.
Sol is a star, so having a dedicated Stars category on the naming scale makes less sense. Treating Astra as Stars set without Sol, the "distance from observer" argument still kind of makes sense.
> My layman reading of the names: there is one Terra, one Luna and one Sol => "Astra" is singular.
That is incorrect. "Astra" is Latin for "stars" (plural). The singular would be "astrum".
Ad Astra. To the stars.
Yeah, this was my initial thought as well... I guess they didn't ask anyone before choosing the new naming scheme. But that isn't particularly surprising.
Size is by far the most obvious one, at least for me.
It doesn't help that the moon and sun have roughly the same apparent size in the sky
Why on earth (no pun intended) would anyone do this?
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Good God, what has happened to people here? You literally wrote that Luna is greater than Terra, Terra is greater than Sol and so on.
Maybe just read this like an arrow?
I didnt know this but apparently Astra is the plural of astrum (latin for star).
Cannot wait for Universe and Multiverse levels.
Or perhaps they'll release Supernova, then Singularity to market their ASI model.
In the multiverse version, the model isn’t any smarter, but it’s evil.
Only if it has a goatee, which is how we know Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man and Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange were only the heroes of their own narratives, and nobody else's.
“Let there be light.”
Astra means star, like the Sun
I went by their illustration of GPT 6 Astra that looks like a spiral galaxy[1].
[1]: https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/
"Stars", if I'm being pedantic.
Not pedantic, the plural is the point. More than one star (Sol).
Astra > Sol > Terra > Luna seems clear enough to me
Leopard (10.5) and Yosemite (10.10) both came with clear version numbers
Model X and Model Y are siblings which do not have a clear hierarchical relationship
Gemini 4 Carbon and Gemini 4 Argon are rather difficult for me to tell at a glance
Confusingly, Carbon is another model in the same size class as Argon. Every other lab would have just called it Gemini 4.1 Argon.
AFAIK they are all (Barium, Argon, Carbon) different checkpoints of the same (ongoing) training run
Ideally, Google would have run with:
Argon > Neon > Helium
That would have been the noble thing to do.
Or the other way around! Radon would have been an awesome name.
Luna/Terra/Sol/Astra make perfect sense, it indicates model tier/size with larger celestial body representing larger model.
Same for Anthropic, consistent model tier naming reused across model generations.
Those are just like i3/i5/i7 or M-series Pro/Max/Ultra.
But Carbon seems to be full replacement of Argon announced two weeks ago, they're same price. So Argon doesn't mean anything, they just picked random element.
Both openai and anthropic names feel much more confusing than cpu names to me.
They'd be fine except every named model has multiple numbered versions, with no consistent relatioship between cost or capability corresponding to the version numbers going up or down.
Could it be an alphabetic system like Ubuntu's?
I thought the obvious next one would have been Boron then
FYI, Model S, 3, X, Y is an acronym for S E X Y.
Lol feeling so dumb rn. How have I not noticed that before and how such an unserious guy is the richest man on earth?
The only hindrance for him was that Ford still held an automotive category trademark for Model E, hence Tesla had to go with Model 3.
He is extremely unserious. Did you miss the part where he cheated at Diablo to try to seem to be some kind of dedicated gamer? Or, y'know, the whole Cybertruck? Or the "pedo guy" comment after his harebrained submersible idea went nowhere and a regular diver saved a bunch of Thai kids?
He's always been deeply unserious.
And DOGE
The pedo-guy comment though I think was him being serious, unfortunately.
And all the 420/69 references. And doing "let that sink in" as a live-action bit.
Just that Z was on the market before 3 was, right?
Oh my god...I just realized SpaceX = Space Sex?
Nah, Elon is well reported to have been crazy about "X.com" since ~2000 and thus it makes sense it got incorporated into SpaceX name
The original was that’s too lame for BitchX.doc and then it got replaced by all sorts of other things. Was an IRC meme before memes were a thing.
Would it have been so hard to call it Gemini 4.1 or 4.5?
Then how would you compete with Anthropic and OAI with such boring names?
Is this was xai isn’t winning because they still use numbers for grok releases?
Do both like OAI and Anthropic do.
terra/sol or opus/haiku give an indication of size (the sun is bigger than the earth, opus is larger than a haiku). Carbon is smaller than argon (periodic table speaking), so that's no longer a helpful way of thinking about the model sizes...
It does more than merely being different, it also collides with the name of another Google project: the Carbon programming language.
True. And if Carbon (6) is better than Argon (18), wouldn't that make Hydrogen (1) the ultimate Gemini model, or will the next model jump to another random element?
Don't worry, the name was chosen as a reminder to everyone of the environmental impact.
Yeah...some people complain about OpenAI and Anthropic's model naming schemes but at least it's fairly obvious from the names how they scale, how is ordering for Argon and Carbon supposed to be interpreted? And there's the 3.x and 2.x models which I don't think have elemental names (at least not public ones). The obvious atomic number or standard weight approach doesn't work.
I cannot figure out how to use anything better than 3.1 pro even on a paying account. There’s 3.8 flash and 3.5 flashlight. I can’t figure out which one is better so I’ve given up trying. It’s just too confusing. there’s too much competition for this type of confusion for the customer.
3.8 flash is probably the sweet spot for most of your use cases. I’ve tried argon once or twice, and haven’t noticed it being better than flash for my dev tasks. Likewise, DeepSeek 4.1 Flash still seems better than any Google model I have access to.
i'm also confused. my speculation is they trained a lot of different versions/revisions of models. maybe they're different base architectures, maybe they're different pretraining sets, or maybe they're different RL/post training regimes, and we're just seeing a few of them. still not sure what the names would mean internally though even in that case
or I'm dumb and its just elements with names starting with A, B, C
I am surprised there is no Gemini: will return in Avengers Doomsday.
Argon - first version, Bismuth - internal, Carbon - second version for the public if I had to make a wild guess.
Other sources say that what was publicly released as Argon was already the second version named Barium internally. So there was a separate internal Argon and public Argon was Barium. Not confusing at all for them! https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1x292ly/a_new_che...
The internal joke was that we're even scaling the off-by-one errors; Gemini 4 was not the fourth major model version.
Still better than Anthropic. If I create someday doomsday device, its turn off code will be to sort Anthropic models by strength given only their names, without access to the internet.
Before Mythos/Fable they were simply size-ordered. A Haiku is a small poem of 3 lines, a Sonnet has 14 lines and an Opus is a larger work.
I suppose a Fable is seen as larger. But some of them can be quite short, and not generally considered poetry.
I found Anthropic to be pretty intuitive.
Clearly, Google has already fired their marketing department and Gemini sucks at this job.
Maybe it thought the names are clear and intuitive (for an LLM perhaps).
Alphabetically sorting chemical elements sounds like something _only_ a marketing department could think of.
Literally. If only elements came already presorted by some kind of a key already...
Hmm..they did come up with Bard.
This naming strategy is bizarre.
There are no good elements for D; Dysprosium is the only one, and it's a mouthful. There are no good elements for E; Europium is the only one and would seem political. Is Fluorine their next release? (And then Gallium or Gadolinium?)
After Carbon, they should just update to Gemini 4.1 or 4.5 or whatever, and drop the random unrelated elements.
I don't think calling a model europium will be seen as political if it is a clear line of alphabetical animals, but who knows what the fine president can cook up
Deuterium?
Ah, so the next will be Dubnium
Dilithium
this captured the sentiment of my first reaction as well
Atleast we stopped hearing "copilot"
Amen
This can't help but remind me of the USB organization's ridiculous naming.
What's so confusing? Gemini is a constellation. Constellations are likely made of carbon and sometimes are made out of flash. And sometimes there's argon involved. Seems to make perfect sense to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't mind Carbon, Argon kind of throws me off because my brain autocompletes to Argonian... I still have no idea what the different ones from OpenAI mean. Can we just go back to "Silver, Gold, Platinum" for naming things? Something simple we've all understood, always.
Reading the Argonian reference made my brain immediately think “The Lusty Carbonian Maid”
Oh man, I just looked it up on my phone (still at work LOL) and I have go to go back to reading books when I play Elder Scrolls, I always seem to read only the ones without the funny stories in them for some reason...
Argonian* Maid
I'm kind of disappointed they haven't hit on releasing some models under the Alphabet name. That'd really stir things up. Then maybe Nest after that.
Ah yeah, Carbon it's so OBVIOUSLY a superior element to Argon!
You must have missed Mendeleev's less well-known Alphabetic Table of the Elements!
I think some sarcastic responses to Mendeleev at the time actually suggested this.
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Anyone still remember Bard? Google would probably desperately want us to forget lmao.
I really liked Bard as a name. IMO it’s much better than Gemini. Not sure why you think they desperately want us to forget it :)
Becase it bombed as a product in a comically bad way? They immediately rebranded.
So they can reuse the name for another product, duh