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.

Next version: Gemini Tokyo Drift

How is this any different than terra, sol etc or leopard, yosemite etc, or model x, y, 3, s ..

It does more than merely being different, it also collides with the name of another Google project: the Carbon programming language.

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.

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.

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?

  O, B, Sc, U, Re?
  Ra, Nd?

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.

This can't help but remind me of the USB organization's ridiculous naming.

Argon - first version, Bismuth - internal, Carbon - second version for the public if I had to make a wild guess.

this captured the sentiment of my first reaction as well

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.

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!

Anyone still remember Bard? Google would probably desperately want us to forget lmao.