Jumping Onto Artificial Intelligence Bandwagon? Here’s How to Name Your AI Chatbot

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Had he known ChatGPT was going to change the world, Sam Altman said last year, he would have spent more time considering what to call it. “It's a horrible name, but it may be too ubiquitous to ever change,” he told comedian Trevor Noah during a podcast. Naming any technology is difficult, but artificial intelligence (AI) is doubly so. It has to evoke a sense of the cutting edge, be at once both sophisticated and safe, perhaps even friendly. A good name leaves room for the technology to grow and change without rendering its moniker obsolete or inaccurate. On top of all this, it has to sound cool.

All these thoughts were presumably reverberating around Google's Mountain View headquarters recently when the company decided it would ditch “Bard,” the name it had given its ChatGPT competitor, and instead bring together all of its AI tools under the name “Gemini.”

I quite liked Bard. Something that takes the work done by countless others and rewrites it as its own seemed appropriately Shakespearean to me. But it doesn't scream cutting edge, and Google's AI is about much more than just writing. Gemini scores points for versatility, but as a result lacks a certain deal of punch. What or who is a Gemini? It could easily be the name of some middle-of-the-road hatchback. (Oh, wait, it was.)

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Still, Gemini at least signals a departure from Google wanting to name AI-powered assistants after itself. When it introduced its voice-controlled Google Assistant, it insisted users address it with “OK Google.” How obnoxious, I wrote at the time, to expect users to say out loud the name of a giant corporation to turn off a light. One time, at a party, I suggested to a cornered Google executive that they should instead rename it “Larry,” after Larry Page, Google's co-founder.

Larry, I offered, was a name we (mostly) associate with friendliness — a key trait you would want. But for an AI, this executive explained, Larry is flawed: It helps greatly to