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I'm surprised they got rid of the Bard name. It struck me as a really smart choice since a Bard is someone who said things, and it's an old/archaic enough word

I'm surprised they got rid of the Bard name. It struck me as a really smart choice since a Bard is someone who said things, and it's an old/archaic enough word to not already be in a zillion other names. Gemini, on the other hand, doesn't strike me as particularly relevant (except that perhaps it's a twin of ChatGPT?), and there are other companies with the same name. EDIT: I can see the advantage of picking a name that, like "Google" also starts with a "G". Just as one data point, bard.com redirects to some other company (bd.com), whereas Gemini.com is a company by that name. I'd be curious on the scuttlebutt on how this decision was reached!

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
There presumably was a time when Google considered going more into the “assistant” branding. They own assistant.ai but they don’t do much with it.
TillE 3y ago
I'm sure "Bard" was primarily a Shakespeare reference (The Bard of Avon, frequently just The Bard), and I liked it too. An appropriate name for a technology that's all about language. Gemini sounds cool and sci-fi though, and maybe it's a bit easier to localize since it's just straight Latin.
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  To me, bard just sounds phonetically gross. Reminds me of “fart” or “beard.” It calls to mind medieval stuff: the Monte Python mud scene, Skyrim’s most annoying NPCs, plucking lutes. But Gemini? That sounds like a legendary space mission; this collective engineering push against the boundaries of human knowledge. I do not have refined tastes. My b.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    I remember when the iPad was announced, and everyone said that people would only ever think of feminine products when they heard the name. It might have been true for a few months, but now it seems quaint that we ever had such concerns.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      Still, what was wrong with iSlate?
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    Barti the only bard to me
  - tomjakubowski 3y ago
    Trying saying it non-rhotically, like a British television presenter
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      Sounds like "bot", which is good from a topical perspective, but bad from a false-positive perspective.
      - tomjakubowski 3y ago
        If you really give it some gusto ("baaaaaaahuhhd") nobody will confuse them :-)
        esafak 3y ago
        That sounds closer to a working class Massachusetts pronunciation.
        gnicholas 3y ago
        Yes, just in time for a Super Bowl commercial: Smaht Bahd
  - rob74 3y ago
    When I hear "bard", I think of this guy from the Asterix comics first: https://asterix.com/en/portfolio/cacofonix/ https://asterix.com/en/portfolio/cacofonix/ - who is notorious for getting on everyone's nerves with his constant singing. > We are not talking here about the rain he brings on each time exercises his vocal cords, but rather about the prevailing atmosphere in the village: when it is time to party, when wild boar are roasting on the spit, you can be sure to find Cacofonix tied hand and feet with a gag in his mouth.
  - digging 3y ago
    > [Gemini] sounds like a legendary space mission Well, it is one. I wish they'd choose a slightly more unique name but camping on well-known words is a beloved tech tradition.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Bard is really funny to me to make fun of. It feels like the discount version of ChatGPT. Like the way that (ironically) TV shows would get microsoft sponsoring and the characters would say "oh you should Bing that", a phrase no human would normally say, and I like to be "ah let me see what Bard thinks about this".
  - lmm 3y ago
    > To me, bard just sounds phonetically gross. Reminds me of “fart” or “beard.” WTF? Do people normally think about words in this way, utterly divorced from their meaning?
    - kortilla 3y ago
      Yes, people that can hear similarities between words do that.
      - worthless-trash 3y ago
        Understand that this is not condesending in any way, as I do not have this experience. If there are these "Feelings" around these words, how is any sentence correctly taken at face value. How does one communicate to these people the direct and correct meaning of the terms used. For example, sentence sounds like seance, do they feel like i'm asking the spirits of the dead ? Correct sounds like wrecked, do they assume that everything is broken in the above sentence. Is communication with fraught with unknown minefields of unintended emotions and misundestandings ?
        d-lisp 3y ago
        Not at all, these "unintended" emotions can be ignored for the most part. But if you ask me, then google is in my foreigner ear one of the stupidest brand name I know of due to its phonetical ressemblance with some words from my native tongue.
- panarky 3y ago
  "Gemini" must refer to its inherently multimodal origins? It's not a text-based LLM that was later adapted to include other modalities. It was designed from the start to seamlessly understand and work with audio, images, video and text simultaneously. Theoretically, this should give it a more integrated and versatile understanding of the world. The promise is that multimodality baked in from the start, instead of bolting image recognition on to a primarily text-based LLM, should give it superior reasoning and problem-solving capabilities. It should excel at complex reasoning tasks to draw inferences, create plans, and solve problems in areas like math and programming. I don't know if that promise has been achieved yet. In my testing so far, Gemini Advanced seems equivalent to ChatGPT 4 in most of my use cases. I tested it on the last few of days worth of programming tasks that I'd solved with ChatGPT 4, and in most cases it returns exactly what I wanted on the first response, compared with the a lengthy back-and-forth required with ChatGPT 4 arrive at the same result. But when analyzing images Gemini Advanced seems overly sensitive and constantly gives false rejections. For example, I asked it to analyze a Chinese watercolor and ink painting of a pagoda-style building amidst a flurry of cherry blossoms, with figures ascending a set of stairs towards the building. ChatGPT 4 gave a detailed response about its style, history, techniques, similar artists, etc. Gemini refused to answer and deleted the image because it detected people in the image, even though they were very small, viewed from the back, no faces, no detail whatsoever. In my (limited) testing so far, I'd say Gemini Advanced is better at analyzing recent events than ChatGPT 4 with Bing. This morning I asked each of them to describe the current situation with South Korea possibly acquiring a nuclear deterrent. Gemini's response was very current and cited specific statements by President Yoon Suk-yeol. Even after triggering a Bing search to get the latest facts, the ChatGPT 4 response was muddy and overly general, with empty and obvious sentences like "pursuing a nuclear weapons program would confront significant technical, diplomatic, and strategic challenges".
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    It seems odd to me that would work better necessarily considering that humans evolved different capabilities many millennia apart and integrated them all with intelligence comparatively late in the evolutionary cycle. So it’s not clear that multimodal from the get go is a better strategy than bolting on extra modalities over time. It could be though since technology is built differently from evolution but interesting to consider
- jprival 3y ago
  I thought “Bard” was an Asimov reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story) (on top of the more obvious references)
  - phinnaeus 3y ago
    It's too close a match for it not to be > The story concerns [...] an old Bard, a child's computer whose sole function is to generate random fairy tales. The boys download a book about computers into the Bard's memory in an attempt to expand its vocabulary, but the Bard simply incorporates computers into its standard fairy tale repertoire.
    - yencabulator 3y ago
      Well the ending sure sounds like an LLM getting stuck: > "the little computer knew then that computers would always grow wiser and more powerful until someday—someday—someday—…" https://blog.gdeltproject.org/llm-infinite-loops-failure-modes-the-current-state-of-llm-entity-extraction/ https://blog.gdeltproject.org/llm-infinite-loops-failure-mod...
  - benatkin 3y ago
    It also rhymes with Card as in Orson Scott Card.
- dgunay 3y ago
  It's not a bad name, but personally when I first heard the name Bard I chuckled because LLMs had already come under so much criticism for their tendency to embellish the truth or say stuff that is just straight up false but sounds cool.
- ants_everywhere 3y ago
  Bards were the people who kept history and genealogy before written history. Think like Homer rather than Shakespeare. I think the name was meant more to evoke the idea that the AI is a repository of all linguistic knowledge in the same way that the bard was. And maybe also the idea that the AI was at your service in the same way the bard was at the service of the ruler.
- felarof 3y ago
  [flagged]
cflewis 3y ago
Gemini is Latin, my guess is it more easily translates to other languages than Bard.
- LukaszWiktor 3y ago
  Who translates product names?
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    I think the suggestion was that it would work well as-is in other languages. It would certainly be natural in romance languages.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    "How does that translate to ..." means "how well does that work in" some other area or context; more analogous to a mathematical translation than a linguistic translation. Just a confusing turn of phrase. They almost certainly didn't mean "what does that translate to ..." in another language. Harmonising product names across regions is hard: Jif was a bathroom cleaning solution in the UK, but it's name was changed to Cif to match the name elsewhere in Europe; and that name sounds silly to UK ears. Meanwhile GIF were always presumed to be pronounced like "gift" (a present) without the final T; but we learnt the creators preferred "Jif" which sounds silly to UK ears because it sounds like a cleaning product! (And also wasn't JIF already a file extension (JPEG Interchange Format). Anyway ... language is hard.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      > Jif was a bathroom cleaning solution in the UK One man's bathroom cleaning solution is another man's creamy peanut butter.
      - svat 3y ago
        “a floor wax and a dessert topping.”
      - 3y ago
CrypticShift 3y ago
I agree. The original reason [1] for the gemini name seems artificial for a generic chatbot. It is OK for the model, and I'm sure a lot of "work" was put into "validating" it for the assistant, or... was it? [1] https://the-decoder.com/how-googles-gemini-ai-model-got-its-name/ https://the-decoder.com/how-googles-gemini-ai-model-got-its-...
pertymcpert 3y ago
Bard just sounds terrible phonetically. Bard. Like something you find in Home Depot or some kind of old timey woodworking tool. Barf. Bored. Bard. Yes I know what it really means but it doesn't change the fact that it's a terrible word.
- earthling8118 3y ago
  That's an incredibly subjective take. I don't agree at all. I don't care what they call it but I don't understand this reasoning.
happytiger 3y ago
Gemeni, or the twins, is a deeply symbolic name for anyone who knows Greek history. It’s the story of Castor and Pollux, and in many versions of the story one brother killed the other only to beg for them to come back. It’s ominous to use this brand name for AI. It’s also associated to the Gemini killer and Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter who were famous as the mafia’s Gemini twins hitmen. I think better brands could have been had. It does sound like some battlefield AI system from Robotron. “Sir, Gemini is charged and ready for battle.”
- closewith 3y ago
  Gemini was a stepping stone to a moonshot, which is almost certainly why the name was chosen. Edit: another poster shared the etymology, the merger between Google Brain and DeepMind. I shall eat my words.
  - happytiger 3y ago
    Perhaps. Corporate entomologies tend to be very well rehearsed stories, and I’ve been around the valley long enough to know those stories aren’t always the whole story. I would encourage you to read the Kissinger / Schmidt book before settling your opinion. That origin story may be true. But it doesn’t make the whole story necessarily. https://time.com/6113393/eric-schmidt-henry-kissinger-ai-book/ https://time.com/6113393/eric-schmidt-henry-kissinger-ai-boo...
    - OrsonSmelles 3y ago
      >corporate entomologies Now there's a ready-made Far Side concept.
    - mangamadaiyan 3y ago
      "Corporate entomology" is a lovely term, evoking surreal (and yet strangely familiar) images of cockroaches in suits. Brilliant!
      - happytiger 3y ago
sho_hn 3y ago
"Bard" always struck me a bad naming - unfamiliar, unfriendly, too cerebral. I think the name was an impediment against establishing a household brand.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  It's possible that it sounds even worse in other languages. That is, it might sound like bad words, onomatopoeia for bodily functions, or common exclamations (that would lead to lots of false positives). I think it could have been established as a brand in the US, given Google's scale. Put a lute in the branding, run some funny commercials, and you're done. EDIT: one thing no amount of branding can fix — the likelihood that people reach for "doh, Bard" (a la Simpsons) when Bard messes up. I could see that becoming a thing.
- happytiger 3y ago
  Maybe named for The Bard’s Tale?
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > unfamiliar, unfriendly, too cerebral The Witcher is one of Netflix's most watch shows. I'd also imagine that most people in English speaking countries have been exposed to Shakespeare's nickname in high school English classes.
  - LudwigNagasena 3y ago
    It’s generally a common trope in fantasy and Romanticist literature. It’s also a word that exists in virtually all European languages in a similar form (bard, bardo, barde, бард), although similar but different forms may be a negative.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      Yes, but I didn't want to assume that most people read literature. Even if they hadn't, "bard" is definitely out there.
benreesman 3y ago
In an increasingly commodity game (the big player LLM game), it’s already starting to hit the asymptote on the main levers: ties to NVIDIA and/or TSMC, serious financing capacity, and enough engagement channel to push it through. (There is much great work happening outside of the Peninsula). I always thought GPT-4 was a little “HAL 9000” of a name for broad-based adoption, but the jury seems in, and the jury rules “cyberpunk is in”.
- airstrike 3y ago
  The broad name is ChatGPT, not GPT-4
  - benreesman 3y ago
    That’s fair, though given the stark UI cue / cost difference, I’m not surprised when I overhear in a random cafe or bar: “yeah but what did ChatGPT Four say?” In any event, it seems that the image of a Decepticon ready for battle on your behalf has a lot more traction than the image of a quaint singer/priest/poet always there with a verbal shot in the arm when the going is tough.
    - bmicraft 3y ago
      They literally call it "ChatGPT 4" (with a colored 4) in the app though
- int_19h 3y ago
  ChatGPT's claim to fame is as bleeding edge tech, and it's squarely down that alley.
  - benreesman 3y ago
    No one outside the factory knows how the sausage is made. Watercooler chat is that it's a 1.75 terraweight 16-choose-4 mixture model quantized at 2.5-3bpw with a mundane rotary encoding and the kind of KV cache that only an Azure or GCP disagg rack can deliver. There's little doubt that they're hanging on by a fingernail with an MMLU lead over the French that is nonetheless real. So something "bleeding-edge" is going on. (Now whether or not MMLU is a useful metric for the usefulness of a model that won't do what you tell it to is debatable, I think it's not). But is that bleeding edge innovation like Galois and the resulting group theory? Or bleeding edge like "holy shit they could keep track of enough people to build the Pyramids at Giza with a low-precision protractor and infinite motivation"? I tend to think that there's a lot of "straight ahead and damn the torpedoes" brute-force arbitrary compute budget subsidized below cost by a hyperscaler in the mix. But who knows. The effectiveness of distillation is suggestive but not conclusive that we can "Shannon" the process recursively up to some unknown bound without anything much fancier than Mixtral from an arch standpoint.
jvolkman 3y ago
There are other considerations when naming something like this. "Bard" likely could never be a wake word on its own, for instance, but I'd imagine that "Gemini" will be at some point.
gavmor 3y ago
The real question is what's nearby each name's vector embedding in terms of whatever similarity metric Gemini will use to talk about the world. That's their new canonical ontology, after all.
richardw 3y ago
And if the brand took off, I imagine you could “Bard” something as a verb but not “Gemini” it.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Perhaps they're hoping people will stick with "google it".
HumblyTossed 3y ago
I think they should have named it gAIl.
erickhill 3y ago
The Bard name gave me a warm fuzzy feeling immediately transporting me back to my youth playing (or at least trying to play) Bard's Tale. The name evoked adventure, excitement and a good dose of dread. And, the idea of it being "role playing" struck me as a master meta stroke. Gemini, from the mythological standpoint, seemed to make more sense to me from an overall business/marketing standpoint. "This AI thing right here is your twin, see? It'll finish your sentences and stuff."
- nomel 3y ago
  > Bard's Tale https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-bards-tale/id480375355 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-bards-tale/id480375355
- coremoff 3y ago
  And similarly anyone playing modern tabletop RPGs will probably associated "Bard" with the smart, charismatic person who buffs the party and debuffs your enemies; perfect for an AI assistant
assimpleaspossi 3y ago
Bard showed some creativity in name selection. Gemini does not. You see that everywhere. Or at least my first thought was about the Gemini spacecraft
skeaker 3y ago
I thought it was in reference to Trurl's Electronic Bard, which just about presciently predicted LLM output (though the process is a bit more dramatic, what with how it simulates the whole universe to get to that output): https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tr...
artdigital 3y ago
They’ve plastered “bard” ads everywhere in Tokyo for a while. Surprised to kill the name so quickly, the marketing team in Japan probably had no idea (Personally, I never liked how Bard sounded. Can’t put my finger on why, it was just not a pleasant name to me)
- ElijahLynn 3y ago
  Same here. Bard is not a sexy name. Gemini is way more sexy. (Neither is ChatGPT, or Google though either). I can't wait until we can call the assistant whatever we want, like Jarvis.
- ithkuil 3y ago
  Barudu?
  - artdigital 3y ago
    Baaado (バード)
- vitorgrs 3y ago
  They also did a lot of (cringe) ads in Brazil.
balls187 3y ago
Same reason Arthur Anderson changed it’s name. Bard was panned. Change the name, lose the bad press.
mos_basik 3y ago
Honestly surprised I'm the first to mention the name collision with the retro-modern linked documents protocol I keep hearing about (on HN) https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq-section-1.gmi https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq-section-1.gmi But glass half full, maybe it's for the better to have one's name shadowed by a Google product if one prefers to avoid eternal septembering one's community.
explodingwaffle 3y ago
I thought it was just supposed to be a pun on “gen’ AI”
- romwell 3y ago
  > thought it was just supposed to be a pun on “gen’ AI” Then they'd have gone with Genie. Which would be kinda genius on their part, but Google isn't that kind of company anymore.
crazygringo 3y ago
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.
- rob74 3y ago
  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.
  - cooper_ganglia 3y ago
    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-name/ https://the-decoder.com/how-googles-gemini-ai-model-got-its-... Jeff Dean's Twitter Post - https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1733580264859926941 https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1733580264859926941
notso411 3y ago
[dead]
nealabq 3y ago
Gemini is not distinct and memorable. It feels like a muddled compromise. I'd name it GooGaa or Googa. Like "Google" and "goo-goo-gaa-gaa" (baby's first babbling). It's flowing, friendly & familiar.
qgin 3y ago
Bard felt like Google was treating LLMs as merely an amusing spinner of tales, just a narrative UI layer over the "real stuff" of the Google Search.
ionwake 3y ago
Bard: fat inept old guy who gets by telling stories of yore Gemini: a crypto exchange Clearly they shouldn’t be asking the 21 year old interns what to call it. Now before anyone in google gets butthurt like they usually do I doubt I could do much better but Gaia IMO would have been mint you know it starts with G is four letters and represents a nebulous deity. Took 3 seconds but hey I’m not paid to think. In fact I’m not paid at all Edit> Gemini ultra is the best llm so far ( it seems) - apart from the name good job guys
- rdsubhas 3y ago
  And it has ai in it's name.
  - ionwake 3y ago
    huh I didn’t even notice that I guess I’m sleepy
  - 0xfab1 3y ago
    If that's the reason, they should've gone with Moai (more AI)
    - ionwake 3y ago
      thats even better lol. hey 缾 how come so few comments? you have a few accounts or what? I feel priviledged.
tarangpatel 3y ago
Bard sounds archaic, almost like an unintelligent persons name, no offense to the bards out there.
prvc 3y ago
>Gemini Symbolizing both human origin intelligence and AI becoming super-intelligent together. I think it's a good name because it draws on ancient human mythology and serves as a reminder of the concept of alignment.
tuan 3y ago
I'm so glad that they've changed the name :) Bard is really difficult for me, a non-native English speaker, to pronounce correctly. I think most people from my country (Vietnam) pronounce Bard as "bahd". Gemini on the other hand is so easy to pronounce.
- int_19h 3y ago
  "baaahd" is more or less how native British English speakers would pronounce it.
felarof 3y ago
[flagged]
jgrowl 3y ago
Astrologically, Gemini is associated with Communication. Specifically social, superficial, quick, back and forth communication. The sign is ruled by Mercury which is associated with Intelligence and being the messenger of the Gods. Mercury is often depicted with winged shoes as the planet itself is the fastest moving planet, orbiting the sun every 88 days. Mercury is considered to be dualistic (The Twins) and also rules the sign of Virgo, an earth sign that is associated with more deep cold analytical categorization.
urbandw311er 3y ago
As a Brit I’ll be glad to see the word association gradually return to that of our greatest playwright rather than something appropriated by big tech.
smcl 3y ago
To me Gemini is just sort of generic and uninteresting. There has to be hundreds or thousands of products and companies based on the name "Gemini" - "Bard" was at least interesting, different and distinct. I've no idea about the quality of the product itself, I have never had a reason to use it. It's long past cliché now but I wouldn't get too attached to a Google product that is definitely costing a lot of money but which has no clear pathway to turning a profit. I think they will keep it ticking over until the hype train moves on from Chatbots/LLMs, and then it'll join the Google Graveyard @ https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com
hef19898 3y ago
The got rid of Bard, and missed the opportunity to either name it Genesys or Legion.
QuadrupleA 3y ago
I'd suspect they're just trying to start over - Bard kinda got pegged as Google's dumb, not-as-good, late-to-the-party clone of ChatGPT. It got teased a lot. I'm not sure Gemini is much different (still more impressed with GPT 3.5 & 4) but I guess the name change gives them a bit of a reset.
dhruvmittal 3y ago
One awkward thing is that Google's Gemini app is currently the third result searching Gemini on the Play Store-- after some bitcoin related applications. The namespace is occupied.
felarof 3y ago
I built https://clashofgpts.com https://clashofgpts.com to use Gemini and GPT4 side-by-side. A good way to use your Gemini Ultra 2months trial and see if you want to switch to Google AI Premium subscription.
mupuff1234 3y ago
Pretty sure gemini will also get replaced eventually with Google assistant branding at least for the consumer facing products, might be still kept for cloud API etc.
baxuz 3y ago
"Bard" to me implies a person who tells tall tales while sounding entertaining. In that regard the naming fits perfectly

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

There presumably was a time when Google considered going more into the “assistant” branding. They own assistant.ai but they don’t do much with it.

TillE 3y ago

I'm sure "Bard" was primarily a Shakespeare reference (The Bard of Avon, frequently just The Bard), and I liked it too. An appropriate name for a technology that's all about language. Gemini sounds cool and sci-fi though, and maybe it's a bit easier to localize since it's just straight Latin.

a_wild_dandan 3y ago
To me, bard just sounds phonetically gross. Reminds me of “fart” or “beard.” It calls to mind medieval stuff: the Monte Python mud scene, Skyrim’s most annoying NPCs, plucking lutes. But Gemini? That sounds like a legendary space mission; this collective engineering push against the boundaries of human knowledge. I do not have refined tastes. My b.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I remember when the iPad was announced, and everyone said that people would only ever think of feminine products when they heard the name. It might have been true for a few months, but now it seems quaint that we ever had such concerns.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    Still, what was wrong with iSlate?
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Barti the only bard to me
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  Trying saying it non-rhotically, like a British television presenter
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    Sounds like "bot", which is good from a topical perspective, but bad from a false-positive perspective.
    - tomjakubowski 3y ago
      If you really give it some gusto ("baaaaaaahuhhd") nobody will confuse them :-)
      - esafak 3y ago
        That sounds closer to a working class Massachusetts pronunciation.
        gnicholas 3y ago
        Yes, just in time for a Super Bowl commercial: Smaht Bahd
- rob74 3y ago
  When I hear "bard", I think of this guy from the Asterix comics first: https://asterix.com/en/portfolio/cacofonix/ https://asterix.com/en/portfolio/cacofonix/ - who is notorious for getting on everyone's nerves with his constant singing. > We are not talking here about the rain he brings on each time exercises his vocal cords, but rather about the prevailing atmosphere in the village: when it is time to party, when wild boar are roasting on the spit, you can be sure to find Cacofonix tied hand and feet with a gag in his mouth.
- digging 3y ago
  > [Gemini] sounds like a legendary space mission Well, it is one. I wish they'd choose a slightly more unique name but camping on well-known words is a beloved tech tradition.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Bard is really funny to me to make fun of. It feels like the discount version of ChatGPT. Like the way that (ironically) TV shows would get microsoft sponsoring and the characters would say "oh you should Bing that", a phrase no human would normally say, and I like to be "ah let me see what Bard thinks about this".
- lmm 3y ago
  > To me, bard just sounds phonetically gross. Reminds me of “fart” or “beard.” WTF? Do people normally think about words in this way, utterly divorced from their meaning?
  - kortilla 3y ago
    Yes, people that can hear similarities between words do that.
    - worthless-trash 3y ago
      Understand that this is not condesending in any way, as I do not have this experience. If there are these "Feelings" around these words, how is any sentence correctly taken at face value. How does one communicate to these people the direct and correct meaning of the terms used. For example, sentence sounds like seance, do they feel like i'm asking the spirits of the dead ? Correct sounds like wrecked, do they assume that everything is broken in the above sentence. Is communication with fraught with unknown minefields of unintended emotions and misundestandings ?
      - d-lisp 3y ago
        Not at all, these "unintended" emotions can be ignored for the most part. But if you ask me, then google is in my foreigner ear one of the stupidest brand name I know of due to its phonetical ressemblance with some words from my native tongue.
panarky 3y ago
"Gemini" must refer to its inherently multimodal origins? It's not a text-based LLM that was later adapted to include other modalities. It was designed from the start to seamlessly understand and work with audio, images, video and text simultaneously. Theoretically, this should give it a more integrated and versatile understanding of the world. The promise is that multimodality baked in from the start, instead of bolting image recognition on to a primarily text-based LLM, should give it superior reasoning and problem-solving capabilities. It should excel at complex reasoning tasks to draw inferences, create plans, and solve problems in areas like math and programming. I don't know if that promise has been achieved yet. In my testing so far, Gemini Advanced seems equivalent to ChatGPT 4 in most of my use cases. I tested it on the last few of days worth of programming tasks that I'd solved with ChatGPT 4, and in most cases it returns exactly what I wanted on the first response, compared with the a lengthy back-and-forth required with ChatGPT 4 arrive at the same result. But when analyzing images Gemini Advanced seems overly sensitive and constantly gives false rejections. For example, I asked it to analyze a Chinese watercolor and ink painting of a pagoda-style building amidst a flurry of cherry blossoms, with figures ascending a set of stairs towards the building. ChatGPT 4 gave a detailed response about its style, history, techniques, similar artists, etc. Gemini refused to answer and deleted the image because it detected people in the image, even though they were very small, viewed from the back, no faces, no detail whatsoever. In my (limited) testing so far, I'd say Gemini Advanced is better at analyzing recent events than ChatGPT 4 with Bing. This morning I asked each of them to describe the current situation with South Korea possibly acquiring a nuclear deterrent. Gemini's response was very current and cited specific statements by President Yoon Suk-yeol. Even after triggering a Bing search to get the latest facts, the ChatGPT 4 response was muddy and overly general, with empty and obvious sentences like "pursuing a nuclear weapons program would confront significant technical, diplomatic, and strategic challenges".
- vlovich123 3y ago
  It seems odd to me that would work better necessarily considering that humans evolved different capabilities many millennia apart and integrated them all with intelligence comparatively late in the evolutionary cycle. So it’s not clear that multimodal from the get go is a better strategy than bolting on extra modalities over time. It could be though since technology is built differently from evolution but interesting to consider
jprival 3y ago
I thought “Bard” was an Asimov reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story) (on top of the more obvious references)
- phinnaeus 3y ago
  It's too close a match for it not to be > The story concerns [...] an old Bard, a child's computer whose sole function is to generate random fairy tales. The boys download a book about computers into the Bard's memory in an attempt to expand its vocabulary, but the Bard simply incorporates computers into its standard fairy tale repertoire.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    Well the ending sure sounds like an LLM getting stuck: > "the little computer knew then that computers would always grow wiser and more powerful until someday—someday—someday—…" https://blog.gdeltproject.org/llm-infinite-loops-failure-modes-the-current-state-of-llm-entity-extraction/ https://blog.gdeltproject.org/llm-infinite-loops-failure-mod...
- benatkin 3y ago
  It also rhymes with Card as in Orson Scott Card.
dgunay 3y ago
It's not a bad name, but personally when I first heard the name Bard I chuckled because LLMs had already come under so much criticism for their tendency to embellish the truth or say stuff that is just straight up false but sounds cool.
ants_everywhere 3y ago
Bards were the people who kept history and genealogy before written history. Think like Homer rather than Shakespeare. I think the name was meant more to evoke the idea that the AI is a repository of all linguistic knowledge in the same way that the bard was. And maybe also the idea that the AI was at your service in the same way the bard was at the service of the ruler.
felarof 3y ago
[flagged]

cflewis 3y ago

Gemini is Latin, my guess is it more easily translates to other languages than Bard.

LukaszWiktor 3y ago
Who translates product names?
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I think the suggestion was that it would work well as-is in other languages. It would certainly be natural in romance languages.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  "How does that translate to ..." means "how well does that work in" some other area or context; more analogous to a mathematical translation than a linguistic translation. Just a confusing turn of phrase. They almost certainly didn't mean "what does that translate to ..." in another language. Harmonising product names across regions is hard: Jif was a bathroom cleaning solution in the UK, but it's name was changed to Cif to match the name elsewhere in Europe; and that name sounds silly to UK ears. Meanwhile GIF were always presumed to be pronounced like "gift" (a present) without the final T; but we learnt the creators preferred "Jif" which sounds silly to UK ears because it sounds like a cleaning product! (And also wasn't JIF already a file extension (JPEG Interchange Format). Anyway ... language is hard.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    > Jif was a bathroom cleaning solution in the UK One man's bathroom cleaning solution is another man's creamy peanut butter.
    - svat 3y ago
      “a floor wax and a dessert topping.”
    - 3y ago

CrypticShift 3y ago

I agree. The original reason [1] for the gemini name seems artificial for a generic chatbot. It is OK for the model, and I'm sure a lot of "work" was put into "validating" it for the assistant, or... was it? [1] https://the-decoder.com/how-googles-gemini-ai-model-got-its-name/ https://the-decoder.com/how-googles-gemini-ai-model-got-its-...

pertymcpert 3y ago

Bard just sounds terrible phonetically. Bard. Like something you find in Home Depot or some kind of old timey woodworking tool. Barf. Bored. Bard. Yes I know what it really means but it doesn't change the fact that it's a terrible word.

earthling8118 3y ago
That's an incredibly subjective take. I don't agree at all. I don't care what they call it but I don't understand this reasoning.

happytiger 3y ago

Gemeni, or the twins, is a deeply symbolic name for anyone who knows Greek history. It’s the story of Castor and Pollux, and in many versions of the story one brother killed the other only to beg for them to come back. It’s ominous to use this brand name for AI. It’s also associated to the Gemini killer and Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter who were famous as the mafia’s Gemini twins hitmen. I think better brands could have been had. It does sound like some battlefield AI system from Robotron. “Sir, Gemini is charged and ready for battle.”

closewith 3y ago
Gemini was a stepping stone to a moonshot, which is almost certainly why the name was chosen. Edit: another poster shared the etymology, the merger between Google Brain and DeepMind. I shall eat my words.
- happytiger 3y ago
  Perhaps. Corporate entomologies tend to be very well rehearsed stories, and I’ve been around the valley long enough to know those stories aren’t always the whole story. I would encourage you to read the Kissinger / Schmidt book before settling your opinion. That origin story may be true. But it doesn’t make the whole story necessarily. https://time.com/6113393/eric-schmidt-henry-kissinger-ai-book/ https://time.com/6113393/eric-schmidt-henry-kissinger-ai-boo...
  - OrsonSmelles 3y ago
    >corporate entomologies Now there's a ready-made Far Side concept.
  - mangamadaiyan 3y ago
    "Corporate entomology" is a lovely term, evoking surreal (and yet strangely familiar) images of cockroaches in suits. Brilliant!
    - happytiger 3y ago

sho_hn 3y ago

"Bard" always struck me a bad naming - unfamiliar, unfriendly, too cerebral. I think the name was an impediment against establishing a household brand.

gnicholas 3y ago
It's possible that it sounds even worse in other languages. That is, it might sound like bad words, onomatopoeia for bodily functions, or common exclamations (that would lead to lots of false positives). I think it could have been established as a brand in the US, given Google's scale. Put a lute in the branding, run some funny commercials, and you're done. EDIT: one thing no amount of branding can fix — the likelihood that people reach for "doh, Bard" (a la Simpsons) when Bard messes up. I could see that becoming a thing.
happytiger 3y ago
Maybe named for The Bard’s Tale?
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> unfamiliar, unfriendly, too cerebral The Witcher is one of Netflix's most watch shows. I'd also imagine that most people in English speaking countries have been exposed to Shakespeare's nickname in high school English classes.
- LudwigNagasena 3y ago
  It’s generally a common trope in fantasy and Romanticist literature. It’s also a word that exists in virtually all European languages in a similar form (bard, bardo, barde, бард), although similar but different forms may be a negative.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    Yes, but I didn't want to assume that most people read literature. Even if they hadn't, "bard" is definitely out there.

benreesman 3y ago

In an increasingly commodity game (the big player LLM game), it’s already starting to hit the asymptote on the main levers: ties to NVIDIA and/or TSMC, serious financing capacity, and enough engagement channel to push it through. (There is much great work happening outside of the Peninsula). I always thought GPT-4 was a little “HAL 9000” of a name for broad-based adoption, but the jury seems in, and the jury rules “cyberpunk is in”.

airstrike 3y ago
The broad name is ChatGPT, not GPT-4
- benreesman 3y ago
  That’s fair, though given the stark UI cue / cost difference, I’m not surprised when I overhear in a random cafe or bar: “yeah but what did ChatGPT Four say?” In any event, it seems that the image of a Decepticon ready for battle on your behalf has a lot more traction than the image of a quaint singer/priest/poet always there with a verbal shot in the arm when the going is tough.
  - bmicraft 3y ago
    They literally call it "ChatGPT 4" (with a colored 4) in the app though
int_19h 3y ago
ChatGPT's claim to fame is as bleeding edge tech, and it's squarely down that alley.
- benreesman 3y ago
  No one outside the factory knows how the sausage is made. Watercooler chat is that it's a 1.75 terraweight 16-choose-4 mixture model quantized at 2.5-3bpw with a mundane rotary encoding and the kind of KV cache that only an Azure or GCP disagg rack can deliver. There's little doubt that they're hanging on by a fingernail with an MMLU lead over the French that is nonetheless real. So something "bleeding-edge" is going on. (Now whether or not MMLU is a useful metric for the usefulness of a model that won't do what you tell it to is debatable, I think it's not). But is that bleeding edge innovation like Galois and the resulting group theory? Or bleeding edge like "holy shit they could keep track of enough people to build the Pyramids at Giza with a low-precision protractor and infinite motivation"? I tend to think that there's a lot of "straight ahead and damn the torpedoes" brute-force arbitrary compute budget subsidized below cost by a hyperscaler in the mix. But who knows. The effectiveness of distillation is suggestive but not conclusive that we can "Shannon" the process recursively up to some unknown bound without anything much fancier than Mixtral from an arch standpoint.

jvolkman 3y ago

There are other considerations when naming something like this. "Bard" likely could never be a wake word on its own, for instance, but I'd imagine that "Gemini" will be at some point.

gavmor 3y ago

The real question is what's nearby each name's vector embedding in terms of whatever similarity metric Gemini will use to talk about the world. That's their new canonical ontology, after all.

richardw 3y ago

And if the brand took off, I imagine you could “Bard” something as a verb but not “Gemini” it.

gnicholas 3y ago
Perhaps they're hoping people will stick with "google it".

HumblyTossed 3y ago

I think they should have named it gAIl.

erickhill 3y ago

The Bard name gave me a warm fuzzy feeling immediately transporting me back to my youth playing (or at least trying to play) Bard's Tale. The name evoked adventure, excitement and a good dose of dread. And, the idea of it being "role playing" struck me as a master meta stroke. Gemini, from the mythological standpoint, seemed to make more sense to me from an overall business/marketing standpoint. "This AI thing right here is your twin, see? It'll finish your sentences and stuff."

nomel 3y ago
> Bard's Tale https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-bards-tale/id480375355 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-bards-tale/id480375355
coremoff 3y ago
And similarly anyone playing modern tabletop RPGs will probably associated "Bard" with the smart, charismatic person who buffs the party and debuffs your enemies; perfect for an AI assistant

assimpleaspossi 3y ago

Bard showed some creativity in name selection. Gemini does not. You see that everywhere. Or at least my first thought was about the Gemini spacecraft

skeaker 3y ago

I thought it was in reference to Trurl's Electronic Bard, which just about presciently predicted LLM output (though the process is a bit more dramatic, what with how it simulates the whole universe to get to that output): https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tr...

artdigital 3y ago

They’ve plastered “bard” ads everywhere in Tokyo for a while. Surprised to kill the name so quickly, the marketing team in Japan probably had no idea (Personally, I never liked how Bard sounded. Can’t put my finger on why, it was just not a pleasant name to me)

ElijahLynn 3y ago
Same here. Bard is not a sexy name. Gemini is way more sexy. (Neither is ChatGPT, or Google though either). I can't wait until we can call the assistant whatever we want, like Jarvis.
ithkuil 3y ago
Barudu?
- artdigital 3y ago
  Baaado (バード)
vitorgrs 3y ago
They also did a lot of (cringe) ads in Brazil.

balls187 3y ago

Same reason Arthur Anderson changed it’s name. Bard was panned. Change the name, lose the bad press.

mos_basik 3y ago

Honestly surprised I'm the first to mention the name collision with the retro-modern linked documents protocol I keep hearing about (on HN) https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq-section-1.gmi https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq-section-1.gmi But glass half full, maybe it's for the better to have one's name shadowed by a Google product if one prefers to avoid eternal septembering one's community.

explodingwaffle 3y ago

I thought it was just supposed to be a pun on “gen’ AI”

romwell 3y ago
> thought it was just supposed to be a pun on “gen’ AI” Then they'd have gone with Genie. Which would be kinda genius on their part, but Google isn't that kind of company anymore.

crazygringo 3y ago

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.

rob74 3y ago
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.
- cooper_ganglia 3y ago
  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-name/ https://the-decoder.com/how-googles-gemini-ai-model-got-its-... Jeff Dean's Twitter Post - https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1733580264859926941 https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1733580264859926941

notso411 3y ago

[dead]

nealabq 3y ago

Gemini is not distinct and memorable. It feels like a muddled compromise. I'd name it GooGaa or Googa. Like "Google" and "goo-goo-gaa-gaa" (baby's first babbling). It's flowing, friendly & familiar.

qgin 3y ago

Bard felt like Google was treating LLMs as merely an amusing spinner of tales, just a narrative UI layer over the "real stuff" of the Google Search.

ionwake 3y ago

Bard: fat inept old guy who gets by telling stories of yore Gemini: a crypto exchange Clearly they shouldn’t be asking the 21 year old interns what to call it. Now before anyone in google gets butthurt like they usually do I doubt I could do much better but Gaia IMO would have been mint you know it starts with G is four letters and represents a nebulous deity. Took 3 seconds but hey I’m not paid to think. In fact I’m not paid at all Edit> Gemini ultra is the best llm so far ( it seems) - apart from the name good job guys

rdsubhas 3y ago
And it has ai in it's name.
- ionwake 3y ago
  huh I didn’t even notice that I guess I’m sleepy
- 0xfab1 3y ago
  If that's the reason, they should've gone with Moai (more AI)
  - ionwake 3y ago
    thats even better lol. hey 缾 how come so few comments? you have a few accounts or what? I feel priviledged.

tarangpatel 3y ago

Bard sounds archaic, almost like an unintelligent persons name, no offense to the bards out there.

prvc 3y ago

>Gemini Symbolizing both human origin intelligence and AI becoming super-intelligent together. I think it's a good name because it draws on ancient human mythology and serves as a reminder of the concept of alignment.

tuan 3y ago

I'm so glad that they've changed the name :) Bard is really difficult for me, a non-native English speaker, to pronounce correctly. I think most people from my country (Vietnam) pronounce Bard as "bahd". Gemini on the other hand is so easy to pronounce.

int_19h 3y ago
"baaahd" is more or less how native British English speakers would pronounce it.

felarof 3y ago

[flagged]

jgrowl 3y ago

Astrologically, Gemini is associated with Communication. Specifically social, superficial, quick, back and forth communication. The sign is ruled by Mercury which is associated with Intelligence and being the messenger of the Gods. Mercury is often depicted with winged shoes as the planet itself is the fastest moving planet, orbiting the sun every 88 days. Mercury is considered to be dualistic (The Twins) and also rules the sign of Virgo, an earth sign that is associated with more deep cold analytical categorization.

urbandw311er 3y ago

As a Brit I’ll be glad to see the word association gradually return to that of our greatest playwright rather than something appropriated by big tech.

smcl 3y ago

To me Gemini is just sort of generic and uninteresting. There has to be hundreds or thousands of products and companies based on the name "Gemini" - "Bard" was at least interesting, different and distinct. I've no idea about the quality of the product itself, I have never had a reason to use it. It's long past cliché now but I wouldn't get too attached to a Google product that is definitely costing a lot of money but which has no clear pathway to turning a profit. I think they will keep it ticking over until the hype train moves on from Chatbots/LLMs, and then it'll join the Google Graveyard @ https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com

hef19898 3y ago

The got rid of Bard, and missed the opportunity to either name it Genesys or Legion.

QuadrupleA 3y ago

I'd suspect they're just trying to start over - Bard kinda got pegged as Google's dumb, not-as-good, late-to-the-party clone of ChatGPT. It got teased a lot. I'm not sure Gemini is much different (still more impressed with GPT 3.5 & 4) but I guess the name change gives them a bit of a reset.

dhruvmittal 3y ago

One awkward thing is that Google's Gemini app is currently the third result searching Gemini on the Play Store-- after some bitcoin related applications. The namespace is occupied.

felarof 3y ago

I built https://clashofgpts.com https://clashofgpts.com to use Gemini and GPT4 side-by-side. A good way to use your Gemini Ultra 2months trial and see if you want to switch to Google AI Premium subscription.

mupuff1234 3y ago

Pretty sure gemini will also get replaced eventually with Google assistant branding at least for the consumer facing products, might be still kept for cloud API etc.

baxuz 3y ago

"Bard" to me implies a person who tells tall tales while sounding entertaining. In that regard the naming fits perfectly