Simon Willison’s Weblog

How Google Got Its Groove Back and Edged Ahead of OpenAI (via) I picked up a few interesting tidbits from this Wall Street Journal piece on Google's recent hard won success with Gemini.

Here's the origin of the name "Nano Banana":

Naina Raisinghani, known inside Google for working late into the night, needed a name for the new tool to complete the upload. It was 2:30 a.m., though, and nobody was around. So she just made one up, a mashup of two nicknames friends had given her: Nano Banana.

The WSJ credit OpenAI's Daniel Selsam with un-retiring Sergei Brin:

Around that time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who had recently retired, was at a party chatting with a researcher from OpenAI named Daniel Selsam, according to people familiar with the conversation. Why, Selsam asked him, wasn’t he working full time on AI. Hadn’t the launch of ChatGPT captured his imagination as a computer scientist?

ChatGPT was on its way to becoming a household name in AI chatbots, while Google was still fumbling to get its product off the ground. Brin decided Selsam had a point and returned to work.

And we get some rare concrete user numbers:

By October, Gemini had more than 650 million monthly users, up from 450 million in July.

The LLM usage number I see cited most often is OpenAI's 800 million weekly active users for ChatGPT. That's from October 6th at OpenAI DevDay so it's comparable to these Gemini numbers, albeit not directly since it's weekly rather than monthly actives.

I'm also never sure what counts as a "Gemini user" - does interacting via Google Docs or Gmail count or do you need to be using a Gemini chat interface directly?