Although it's tempting to see it that way, the name actually comes from its unification of multimodal understanding and generation. i.e., it goes in both directions -- Janus is the god with two faces.

This is also the second version of Deepseek's Janus; it's not entirely new.

Janus also describes a specific error in image generation where two faces are created where there should only be one face.

for some reason, I keep thinking "hugh janus" when I see the name