Why we changed our name
You might have noticed that we’ve quietly gone and changed our name. We love Syvain as a name, but it turns out people find it hard to pronounce and remember.
So we went through a ton of ideas of what to change it to, with inspiration from mathematics, from Finnish nature, we thought of names like inkfish (the Finnish word for octopus translates as inkfish), Knowledge Machine (that’s Finnish for computer), Alecton, Ate AI (a low moment, to be sure).
We’ve been naming our experiments with three digits since the start, and we were just working on experiment 041: Moonshine Explosion. Within our team, that’s how we refer to our work. “Have you seen the results from 041?” The number 041 was on the whiteboard, and Juho said “what about just 041?” And it felt like a perfect choice after a wave of ex post facto reasoning, snippets of which below:
- It sits in maths and numbers, not linguistics
- If you read it in leet (1337), it reads “oh AI”
- One step short of 42, the answer to life, the universe and everything
- The unlucky, 13th, prime 👻
- Read as decimal ASCII, 41 represents ), the closing parenthesis. Lisp!
- Increasingly vague connections to nature (did you know a rose is considered very full if it has 41 petals?)
So here we are, 041. Oh-four-one.