Per Business Insider[0], Argon and Carbon were part of an alphabetical lineup:

> An internal document shows that Google has tested a series of Gemini 4 models, internally named Argon, Barium, and Carbon.

Then I suppose they tacked on Hydrogen since it's supposed to be a "light" model and hydrogen is the lightest element. I agree that it's super confusing though.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employees-test-new-ge...

Density at standard temperature and pressure? Carbon admittedly has a number of forms at STP but they're all solid and thus heavier than argon gas.

Density of the most common (on Earth) allotropes at STP, perhaps?

Or maybe they just pick them out of a hat.

nodejs release names

alphabetical skipping the weird names

next would be iron krypton and lithium

+1 to this the naming is totally opaque and ridiculous.

There is no hint of what each one does. I get that these were internal code names, fine, but to everyone outside Google it's not helpful to have these meaningless names.

ChatGPT and Claude aren't much better - there is still quite a lot of assumed knowledge there assuming you know what e.g. a sonnet is and what an opus is - but at least if you squint there is something there.

Google's names just seem to be randomly generated.

Maybe they were worried that the 3.1 Pro model being around for so lunch ruined the brand? But 3.8 Flash was pretty decent I thought so it's not like "flash" was burnt. I dunno.

The choice is really odd. Hydrogen and Carbon could have an organic chemistry theme going if they chose Oxygen, but then they go with Argon? Anthropic and Open AI have the names figured out in terms of obvious size: Luna->Terra->Sol->Astra and Haiku->Sonnet->Opus->Fable->Mythos makes intuitive sense. I have no idea how the Google model size class works.

I know some people are still a bit confused by astra, sol, terra, and luna, but at least you can explain the reasoning and it makes sense. Google's new naming scheme is just pure luna...cy.

I don't know why but this post reminded me of the show(books) Altered Carbon.

Also totally agree. What a bad way to name models...

We'll know they've achieved super intelligence when tech companies suddenly have sensible product names.

Yeah, they really fumbled the naming scheme for this batch of models.

At this point even using Starbucks sizes would be better.

I now believe that they're trolling.