Comment by jodrellblank
2 years ago
There's some dissonance in the the way this will swamp out searches for the web-alternative Gemini protocol by the biggest tech company in the world proudly boasting how responsible and careful they are being to improving things "for everyone, everywhere in the world".
It's probably just an unfortunate coincidence. After all, Gemini is a zodiac sign first and foremost, you'd have to specify what exactly you want anyway.
It probably is a coincidence. But as-per my other comment, an unfortunate one.
Take all the hundreds of thousands of words in popular languages. And all the human names. And all possible new made up words and made up names. And land on one that's a project with a FAQ[1] saying "Gemini might be of interest to you if you: Value your privacy and are opposed to the web's ubiquitous tracking of users" - wait, that's Google's main source of income isn't it?
[1] https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi
Wasn't Gemini part of Greek Mythology way, way before? Aren't you losing maybe thousands of years here?
Gemini as a web protocol isn't even on the top 5 list of things that come up when you think about Gemini prior to this announcement. It would be surprising if anyone involved in naming the Google product even knew about it.
> "Gemini as a web protocol isn't even on the top 5 list of things that come up when you think about Gemini prior to this announcement."
And now it never will be :)
Maybe they shouldn't have chosen such a common word if they didn't want to be confused with something else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini
It's not just the confusion part, it's the behaviour part; Google is a web browser near-monopolist, AI is a big hyped thing with a lot of media noise, and Google has plonked their AI right on top of a small competitor, and done it while crowing about how moral they are.
It's more like Uber releasing an AI called Taxi so all web searches for taxis show you Uber results and you saying "taxi is a word used by lots of companies".
Let's do a reality check here.
* "Gemini" is an extremely common word.
* The meaning of the dictionary word "Gemini" (a constellation in the zodiac, related to twins) is unrelated to either web protocols or AI.
* The Gemini protocol is new and rather confidential.
Do we agree on that?
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Killing ad free internet is good for google shareholders. That’s the “everyone” they’re talking about in case it wasn’t clear.