The company’s new AI system will be called Apple Intelligence, and it will come to new versions of the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems.
Apple’s approach to AI branding, closely tied to its ecosystem and new features, leverages the company’s established reputation for seamless integration. Their AI is instantly recognizable as “Apple” and benefits from the brand’s association with quality.
As anyone would, I took a look into Google’s AI “Gemini” and reseached where they go their name from. Here’s what I found:
Jeff Dean, Gemini’s co-technical lead:
Gemini is Latin for “twins.” In astronomy, it’s the name of a constellation associated with Greek mythological twins Castor and Pollux, for which its two brightest stars are named. Naturally, then, the meaning behind our AI model’s name is two-fold.
For one, a key characteristic of the Gemini zodiac sign is a dual-natured personality, capable of adapting quickly, connecting to a wide range of people, and seeing things from multiple perspectives — themes well suited for what was happening at Google at the time.
For nearly a decade, DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research were responsible for some of the world’s biggest research breakthroughs in AI, including deep learning at scale, deep reinforcement learning and AlphaGo, the Transformer architecture that underpins nearly all large language models (LLMs) today and much more. To further accelerate our progress, in April 2023, the teams joined forces to form Google DeepMind, bringing their talent in AI, computing power, infrastructure and resources together all under one team.
“The Gemini effort came about because we wanted to bring our teams working on language modeling closer together,” Jeff says. “I felt the twins aspect of the name ‘Gemini’ was a great fit. The twins here are the folks in the legacy Brain team and the legacy DeepMind team, who started to work together on this ambitious multimodal model project.”
That’s definitely a long, yet meaningful explanation for the first part of where “Gemini” came from for Google’s AI. It wasn’t a “crack marketing team”, as Craig Federighi would say, to have an endgoal to sell hardware with a catchy name. The later half of the reason was interesting too.
The other inspiration for the name is also space-related: NASA’s early moonshot program, Project Gemini, which lasted from 1965 to 1968.
The pivotal space program was the bridge between the Mercury missions, which determined humans could survive in space, and Apollo, which put the first person on the moon. Project Gemini, so-named for its two-person spacecraft (which was, coincidentally, powered by a Titan rocket), was designed to test equipment and techniques for keeping astronauts in space for extended time ahead of Apollo. It flew 10 crews to space and led to significant feats, such as the first U.S. spacewalk and the first-ever linking of two spacecraft together in Earth orbit.
Project Gemini’s significance to the success of the Apollo program resonated with the team. At one point, Jeff proposed the name “Gemini” in a comment in a Doc the team was working on, and it stuck. “I was immediately sold on the name, because the monumental effort of training LLMs resonated with the spirit of launching rockets,” says Oriol Vinyals, Gemini’s co-technical lead. “It was very fitting to name the most ambitious project we have ever embarked on as Gemini.”
Google’s AI rebranding, from Bard to the ubiquitous Gemini, has created an interesting dynamic. While tech enthusiasts, like myself, understand Gemini’s connection to Google, the average user might simply refer to it as “Google’s AI” or “Gemini.” This mirrors the trend seen with ChatGPT, which, despite being developed by OpenAI, is primarily known as “ChatGPT” outside of the tech sphere.