.jpg "Esoteric Programming Languages Are Fun—Until They Kill the Joke")
Google executives took the stage this week at I/O to unveil their latest AI technology: Deep Think. Or was it Deep Search? Then there’s the new subscription plan, Google AI Pro, which used to be Gemini Advanced, plus the new AI Ultra plan. Then there’s Gemini in Chrome, which is different from AI Mode in search. Project Starline is now Google Beam, there are Gems and Jules, Astra and Aura… you get the idea. The products overlap in confusing ways, the naming conventions are diabolical, and I’m begging Google to return some semblance of sanity to its product line before we all lose our DeepMinds.
In Google’s defense, at least we’re not calling any of these things Bard. That was Google’s original name for its AI chatbot during the Great Chatbot Rush of 2023. OpenAI shipped ChatGPT, and apparently Google decided it had to ship something before there was time to consider not naming it Bard. The company corrected that mistake and went with Gemini, folding in Duet along the way. This was all a very good idea.
This week’s Google I/O made it clear that the naming conventions are out of control again. There’s Gemini 2.5 Pro Deep Think, which is designed to reason through complex math and coding problems. It’s a product of DeepMind, which is Google’s parent company’s AI research arm. Oh, and there’s Deep Search, which is part of the new AI Mode coming to Google Search. And then there’s Search Live, which lets you point a camera at something and ask questions about it. But don’t confuse it with Gemini Live, which you can also use to point a camera at something and ask questions about it. Also, Google Lens still exists? That’s where I keep getting lost.
There’s Veo, which is Google’s image-generation model, and Flow, an AI video editing tool, and then Flow TV, where you can watch other people’s weird AI-generated videos. We’ve got Vertex, Lyria, and Imagen, which might also be a list of potential baby names from, like, 2007. There are all of the various flavors of Gemini, including the multimodal AI assistant, not to be confused with Project Astra, which is also a multimodal AI assistant — just one you can’t use yet. There’s Project Mariner, the click-around-a-website agent mode, which is confusing to me personally as a Seattle Mariners fan. This was doubly confusing when Google demoed it purchasing tickets for a Cincinnati Reds game, but I digress.
I do have a little sympathy for Google. We’re watching the company discover how to develop and market emerging technologies and the tools to use them in real time. On stage, CEO Sundar Pichai called the pace of new product releases “relentless.” Google is under pressure from OpenAI, Meta, and its shareholders to ship AI features as fast as it can invent them. Maybe it doesn’t leave a lot of time to spend on clever naming strategies.
But this feels like the trickle-down effect of a familiar, uniquely Google problem: separate teams working on similar technologies that don’t talk to each other. That’s how you end up launching seven different chat apps with slightly different features and slightly different names, or maybe nine different ways to use AI to search for a new pair of shoes. Would you like to use AI to help you buy things, by the way? Google would like to help.
The funny thing is we’re talking about Google. As in, just Google it. The company name that became a verb you use whenever you need to find something out. Google rivals the likes of “Kleenex” in terms of household recognition. But the name “Google” feels like an artifact of a long-gone era when some lovable goofballs reinvented how we use the web. Here and now, I’m looking at a press release about new AI features while trying to understand which belong to Gemini, what Project Mariner does, what Astra has to do with Lens, and feeling a little lost. Guess I’ll just Google it.
