I think there is valid criticism of google for inventing a cool technology only to have the rest of the industry discover its usefulness before them. But to say Gemini 1.0 or OG Gemma aren't first generation models because BERT and flan existed before is like saying the iPad wasn't a first generation device because Apple made the Newton. Like sure, they're the same in that they're transformers trained on language and text, but these are new families of models. The training mechanisms are different, their architectures are different, the data sets are different, the intended purpose of the models are completely different, etc. At some point I guess it's a semantic difference, maybe.