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.

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?

But I come from a latin language background, so maybe I'm a bit biased there.

    Luna  = Moon
    Terra = Earth
    Sol   = Sun
    Astra = Galaxy

Size wise Astra is not categorically bigger than Sol, both in absolute terms and the observed size.

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.

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.

That is incorrect. "Astra" is Latin for "stars" (plural). The singular would be "astrum".

He's always been deeply unserious.

The pedo-guy comment though I think was him being serious, unfortunately.

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.

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.

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

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

or I'm dumb and its just elements with names starting with A, B, C

I suppose a Fable is seen as larger. But some of them can be quite short, and not generally considered poetry.

Maybe it thought the names are clear and intuitive (for an LLM perhaps).

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.