4 ms·
Perplexity is a really terrible name for a product and that alone will hold it back from being a real competitor.
by keiferski 2y ago
Perplexity is a really terrible name for a product and that alone will hold it back from being a real competitor.
- Me1000 2y agoIt's not like ChatGPT (or ChatGTP as half of people call it) is much better.
- keiferski 2y agoChatGPT 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.
- skybrian 2y agoYou’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.
- keiferski 2y agoBut 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.
- echoangle 2y agoIsn’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“?
- keiferski 2y agoThe average person definitely doesn’t know what perplexity means, and even perplexed is itself a bit of an advanced vocabulary word.
- esafak 2y agoIt's not a nonsensical word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity
- keiferski 2y agoThat is why I wrote: (for those unfamiliar with the concept)
- SG- 2y agoin French it translates to ChatFart when you read it out loud.
- DrBenCarson 2y agoIt 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
- woadwarrior01 2y agoChatGTP 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.
- soheil 2y agoAgreed, it's as if someone completely ignored the meaning of the word and just decided what sounds good for an AI app.
- woadwarrior01 2y agoI've always thought that the name is very ironic and perhaps "certitude" would've been a better name.
- currymj 2y agoA good language model is one with low perplexity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity Reasonable name for a language model startup.
- keiferski 2y agoIt 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.
- currymj 2y agoGenerative Pretrained Transformer is also a terrible brand name but it doesn’t seem to matter.
- keiferski 2y agoBecause the name isn't Generative Pretrained Transformer, it's GPT.
- staticman2 2y agoPerplexity sounds no weirder to me for a tech product than than Google or Yahoo or Apple.
- keiferski 2y agoThose are all short and easy to say. Very obvious difference between them and a long complicated word like Perplexity.
- stocknoob 2y agoWould False Positive be a good name for a medical screening service?
- toephu2 2y agoSame 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.