Google AI Product Names: Worse Than the Cheese Fixation

February 4, 2025

This blog post is the work of a real-live dinobaby. No smart software involved.

If you are Googley, you intuitively and instantly know what these products are:

Gemini Advanced 2.0 Flash

Gemini Advanced 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental

2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental with apps

2.0 Pro Experimental

1.5 Pro

1.5 Flash

If you don’t get it, you write articles like this one: “You Only Need to See This Screenshot Once to Realize Why Gemini Needs to Follow ChatGPT in Making Its AI Products Less Confusing.” Follow ChatGPT, from the outfit OpenAI which is an open source and a non profit with a Chief Wizard who was fired and rehired more quickly than I can locate hallucinations in ChatGPT whatever. (With Google hallucinations, particularly in the cheese department, I know it is just a Sundar & Prabhakar joke.) With OpenAI, I am not quite sure of anything other than a successful (so far) end run around the masterful leader of X.com.

The write up says:

What we want is AI that just works, with simple naming conventions. If you look at the way Apple brands its products, it normally has up to three versions of a product with a simple name indicating the differences. It has two versions of its MacBook – the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro – and its latest iPhone – iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro – that’s nice and simple.

Yeah, sure, Apple is the touchstone with indistinguishable iPhones, the M1, M2, M3, and M4 which are exactly understood as different by what percentage of the black turtleneck crowd?

Here’s a tip: These outfits are into marketing. Whether it is Apple designers influencing engineers or Google engineers influencing art history majors, neither company wants to do what courses in branding suggest; for example, consistency in naming and messaging and community engagement. I suppose confusion in social media and bafflement when trying to figure out what each black box large language model delivers other than acceptable high school essays and made up information is no big deal.

Word prediction is okay. Just a tip: Use the free services and read authoritative sources. Do some critical thinking. You may not be Googley, but you will be recognized as an individual who makes an honest effort to formulate useful outputs. Oh, you can label them experimental and flash to add some mystery to your old fashioned work, not “flash” work which is inconsistent, confusing, and sort of dumb in my opinion.

Stephen E Arnold, March 4, 2025

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Google, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.