It's not just the confusion part, it's the behaviour part; Google is a web browser near-monopolist, AI is a big hyped thing with a lot of media noise, and Google has plonked their AI right on top of a small competitor, and done it while crowing about how moral they are.

It's more like Uber releasing an AI called Taxi so all web searches for taxis show you Uber results and you saying "taxi is a word used by lots of companies".

Let's do a reality check here.

* "Gemini" is an extremely common word.

* The meaning of the dictionary word "Gemini" (a constellation in the zodiac, related to twins) is unrelated to either web protocols or AI.

* The Gemini protocol is new and rather confidential.

Do we agree on that?

I think it's a coincidence, not an evil plot. Gemini is new but not confidential - niche, little used, never likely to be a real competitor, I agree with that. I don't think it being a common word is relevant - there are lots of common words they could use.

But particularly Google claim to organize the world's information. And right now they are claiming to be good at AI. And search. And they claim to be trying to do some kind of moral/ethical good on top - i.e. going out of their way not to cause harm, and to cause improvement. If any group on Earth had the skills and technologies to pick a name which wouldn't clash with anything, with smart people, language analysis and AI and all the world's data, it should be Google.

And instead they've landed right slap bang on the name of a competitor!

Isn't that amusing?

I wonder if there's any other name they could have called it which would coincidentally damage a small competitor in a way that has plausible deniability ("it's a common word" - they obviously couldn't call it "Yahoo! Mail" or "Baidu") and little pushback?