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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Perplexity is a really terrible name for a product and that alone will hold it back from being a real competitor.

It's not like ChatGPT (or ChatGTP as half of people call it) is much better.

ChatGPT isn't a great name, but it's easy to say, spell, and remember. And at this point, a lot of people just know them as OpenAI, which is a great name.

Perplexity sounds like a parody startup name from the Silicon Valley TV show. Way too complicated and unnatural.

You’re saying that now, but getting the initials in “ChatGPT” in the right order took a while to learn, so I wouldn’t say it’s easy to remember, and it seems easy to stumble saying it, too?

It’s all about familiarity. Once people learn it, it’s not hard.

But it didn't matter if they were in order or not, because ChatPTG or ChatTGP all go to the same place via Google, etc. It could have been called Chat + [Any 3 characters] and been fine.

Perplexity is just a nonsensical word (for those unfamiliar with the concept) that is too long and hard to spell. They'd be better off just chopping it down to Lexity, or Lex, or Plexity, or Plex, etc.

Isn’t perplexity a normal English word? Does an average American not know what perplexity in the usual sense is? The word has a meaning outside of AI, too. Or would they only recognize „perplexed“?

The average person definitely doesn’t know what perplexity means, and even perplexed is itself a bit of an advanced vocabulary word.

It's not a nonsensical word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity

That is why I wrote:

(for those unfamiliar with the concept)

in French it translates to ChatFart when you read it out loud.

It became a good name once it became a watershed viral phenomenon. Everything being equal yeah not a great name but it defined a new hype cycle so it got a pass

ChatGTP and other variants with a Levenshtein distance of 1 from ChatGPT have been typosquatted to death by subscriptionware wrappers on the App Store and the Play Store. Many of them seem to be quite successful.

A good language model is one with low perplexity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity

Reasonable name for a language model startup.

It would be a logical name if its customers were technicians familiar with LLMs, and not end businesses and consumers. Which is why Ford wasn't named Internal Combustion Engine, Apple wasn't named Graphics Processing Unit, etc.

Generative Pretrained Transformer is also a terrible brand name but it doesn’t seem to matter.

Because the name isn't Generative Pretrained Transformer, it's GPT.

Perplexity sounds no weirder to me for a tech product than than Google or Yahoo or Apple.

Those are all short and easy to say. Very obvious difference between them and a long complicated word like Perplexity.

Would False Positive be a good name for a medical screening service?

Agreed, it's as if someone completely ignored the meaning of the word and just decided what sounds good for an AI app.

Same with 'Claude 3.5 Sonnet'.

At first I thought it was some piano piece like "Mazurkas, Op. 59" by Chopin, or had something to do with some French guy in the AI field.

I've always thought that the name is very ironic and perhaps "certitude" would've been a better name.

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