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Gemini got its first mention at I/O in 2023, when we briefly shared our first natively multimodal model was in training and already showing impressive capabilities. One year later, google’ve brought Gemini models to Search, Ads, Workspace, Pixel and more, including some of the biggest innovations we shared on the I/O stage yesterday.

As Gemini continues to make a name for itself, we wondered, where did that name come from? To find out, we asked the Google DeepMind team to share the origin story behind why they called it “Gemini.”

The story behind the name

Early on, a placeholder title for the project was “Titan,” the name of Saturn’s largest moon. “I wasn’t a huge fan of that name,” says Jeff Dean, Gemini’s co-technical lead. But it gave him an idea — or perhaps a sign — for a name grounded in space.

Gemini is Latin for “twins.” In astronomy, it’s the name of a constellation associated with Greek mythological twins Castor and Pollux, for which its two brightest stars are named. Naturally, then, the meaning behind our AI model's name is two-fold.

For one, a key characteristic of the Gemini zodiac sign is a dual-natured personality, capable of adapting quickly, connecting to a wide range of people, and seeing things from multiple perspectives — themes well suited for what was happening at Google at the time.

For nearly a decade, DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research were responsible for some of the world’s biggest research breakthroughs in AI, including deep learning at scale, deep reinforcement learning and AlphaGo, the Transformer architecture that underpins nearly all large language models (LLMs) today and much more. To further accelerate our progress, in April 2023, the teams joined forces to form Google DeepMind, bringing their talent in AI, computing power, infrastructure and resources together all under one team.