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Comment by rossant | Hacker News Reader

> Anthropic deliberately gave Claude a male name to buck the trend of female AI assistants (Siri, Alexa, etc).

In France, the name Claude is given to males and females.

Mostly males. I’m French and "Claude can be female" is a almost a TIL thing (wikipedia says ~5% of Claudes are women in 2022 — and apparently this 5% is counting Claudia).

Didn't know that, thanks!

(According to this source, it's more ~12% females https://www.capeutservir.com/prenoms/prenom.php?q=Claude)

It’s actually really sexist that when the first truly intelligent AI emerge people would now give them male names.

Yes. It is pity that common male name of o5-pro-mini is used to refer to AGI instead of widespread female name Deepseek R7.

Aleksa is male Slavic name

Aleksandr (diminuitive being Alyosha) is male. Aleksandra (Sasha) is female. I've never heard anyone male or female called "Aleksa". Perhaps in some regional dialect but doubtful. There's Alik (pronounced AH-l'eek) as a shortened form for some middle-aged men in russian-speaking central asia, and Oleg in russia (pronounced ah-L'EHG).

In the russian diaspora in the US, Alex is pronounced AH-leks. If there was an analogous Alexa (there isn't) the pronunciation would be ah-LEK-sa like the service.

Plenty of male Aleksa's in Balkans

Ah so lexically close to Aleksii in Ukrainian or Alexei in Russian. I plumbed my knowledge but it may have sounded absolutist.

However, colloquially, I think most people are not aware of Balkan naming conventions. How do you pronounce Aleksa in Croatian?

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