By Abram Brown
July 19, 2025
Silicon Valley has many flaws. A prominent one: an industrywide aversion to good, catchy names. Too many lowercase letters. Too few vowels. Sometimes a name just makes zero sense—or it’s the umpteenth iteration of an idea. I often wonder how far the problem extends. Do the clerks manning the Bay Area’s baby-name registries retreat home each evening in quiet despair?
The AI moguls are especially egregious offenders—and Mark Zuckerberg is certainly no exception. Meta’s open-source model is variously called Llama, LLaMA and sometimes Large Language Model Meta AI. (Yeah, eesh.) Meta has dubbed its latest AI model Behemoth, according to The New York Times, and I hope part of what Zuckerberg’s new multibillion-dollar brain trust does is talk him into another name pronto—one that doesn’t make the AI sound like it might swallow Geppetto.
I asked Jay Jurisich, CEO and co-founder of Zinzin, a San Francisco–based branding and naming agency, why AI companies seemed to struggle so much with names.
“It’s a gold rush right now. They’re really just scrambling to get their product out with any name whatsoever,” said Jurisich, who has advised several AI startups. “I don’t think they’re putting a whole lot of thought or care into a name. And that’s amplified by the fact that a lot of them are hoping to get bought and then absorbed, so it then doesn’t really matter what the name is.”
I posed the same question to Phil Davis, who runs a similar agency, Tungsten Branding. “I feel some bro code flowing through this,” he said. In his experience, a roomful of male engineers generally comes up with low-quality branding. (By contrast, he quite likes the name of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines, which he thinks has a catchy simplicity he likened to George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic.)
“But, like, Grok—what is that, a root?” he asked.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/weekend-can-meta-fix-common-ai-flaw