Gemini: Google reveals what inspired it to name its newest AI model

what was going on Naming inspirations GeminiArtificial intelligence (AI), which should increasingly take part in our daily lives? With the popularity of the tool, Google decided to share details about the origin of the bot’s name this Thursday (15).

Its multi-modal language model was launched in December last year to compete with ChatGPT and other generative AIs It would be called “Titan”, referring to Saturn’s largest moon. However, this choice did not please Google DeepMind team leader Jeff Dean, who suggested another space-related word.

The option he gave was Gemini, which means “twin” in Latin and means a star in astronomy. Constellation associated with the twins Castor and Pollux in Greek mythology. The choice was not by chance, as the artificial intelligence division of big tech Google Research consists of two teams: DeepMind and Brain.

In April last year, They came together and founded Google DeepMindGoogle is pooling computing power, infrastructure and resources to launch Gemini. But it took years of work from both teams to get there.

Space mission also inspired

Together with the new team, the search giant’s experts took on the task of creating a series of powerful, multi-modal artificial intelligence models. They took inspiration from Project Gemini for this. NASA’s lunar program from 1965 to 1968Between the Mercury and Apollo missions.

The spacecraft has a capacity of two people and is powered by a Titan rocket. took astronauts and equipment for long-term tests in space. These missions enabled the first spacewalk in the United States and an unprecedented connection between two spacecraft in Earth orbit.

Such successes inspired Google DeepMind. It led Dean to definitively recommend the name Gemini to colleagues. “The name immediately convinced me because the tremendous effort put into training LLMs (language models) resonated with the spirit of launching rockets,” said team co-leader Oriol Vinyals.

Engineers continue to work on advances in the model, resulting in the release of the latest version of AI. Gemini 1.5 FlashAnnounced at Google I/O 2024.