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Grok, o3 and ELMo – there’s a reason AI names are so weird
Incoherent nomenclature is a tradition in the tech sector, where titles are often designed to amuse teams, not users.
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Mr Elon Musk’s sassy “anti-woke” chatbot Grok is a tech-person term for understanding something (as in, you grok a design).
PHOTO: REUTERS
Elaine Moore
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At the tail-end of January, artificial intelligence (AI) start-up OpenAI released its latest model – a cute-sounding version called o3-mini. Designed to repel cheap Chinese rivals, it chalked up another victory for the sector’s mystifying inability to think up coherent names.
See if you can spot the problem: The o3-mini came out six months after the 4o mini. And the 4o mini was released after the 4, which came out after the 3.5. Last week, co-founder Sam Altman confirmed that the next release would be the 4.5.
