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.