It’s a missed opportunity that they didn’t go with atomic numbers or mass for model sizes. Both OpenAI and Anthropic does that.
Helium < Neon < Argon < Krypton < Xenon in increasing order, all very cool names.
Google went with the alphabetical order instead, which is less meaningful than the version numbers for the average user.
The problem is that these names are random and never-ending. They are not categorized like Claude and GPT, both of which have four classes of models each. That's eight classes that I can remember.
There is no way I will be able to (nor do I want to) remember more than four names just for Google or any other single provider, and there's no value in doing so for me. There's nothing unique or distinguished that Gemini does that neither Claude nor GPT can.