Its not so bad. If they were radio astronomers they'd call it Very Big Neuronal Language Model. IBM would call it Watson Advanced AI. If they were a gamer accessory company they'd call it DeepTek Ultra Pro VDH-Max AI A320M. Chinchilla is nice and fluffy.

Large language models have a (recent) history of silly names. BERT, BART, ELMO, RoBERTa, BIGBIRD, PaLM, Megatron etc. Might as well go full nonsense.

My theory is since no one reads literature anymore, timeless, interesting and unique names from history and other cultures are lost to a deluge of soon to be forgotten gag, pop-culture and meme names. Perhaps this is why we have Chinchilla and not Oberon.

Like the Oberon OS and programming language?

Image models too - the Inception paper from 2014 directly refers to knowyourmeme.com and the "we need to go deeper" meme from the movie Inception - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-need-to-go-deeper - it's the first reference in the paper [1] and it's also why the model is called that way.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.4842.pdf

A touch of irony that cutting edge research on language can’t produce better names.

True. I will add that it is customary to justify it by demonstrating it is some sort of acronym or contraction.

It's a recursive, selective acronym

               C
              CH
             CHI
            CHIN
           CHINC
          CHINCH
         CHINCHI
        CHINCHIL
       CHINCHILL
  ==> CHINCHILLA
      HINCHILLA
      INCHILLA
      NCHILLA
      CHILLA
      HILLA
      ILLA
      LLA
      LA
      A

I know what recursive means, I know what selective means, I know what an acronym is, and I think I see the pattern in that picture, but when I put it all together I am lost.

Alternatively, is this a joke and the "recursive, selective acronym" can be used to justify any word?

               A
              AR
             ARB
            ARBI
           ARBIT
          ARBITR
         ARBITRA
        ARBITRAR
  ==>  ARBITRARY
       RBITRARY
       BITRARY
       ITRARY
       TRARY
       RARY
       ARY
       RY
       Y

Yup, seems it works for any word.

There were a lot of complaints about earlier models being named, say, 'Meena'. (It's very sexist, you know, to name a chatbot a female name.) People won't complain about 'Chinchilla' because chinchillas are adorable. PaLMs aren't adorable, but at least it's neutral.

It outperforms the Gopher model

Yet oddly enough I don't think chinchillas are smaller than gophers

Yeah, similar "thematic" naming to MacOS versions. I don't know why the original one was called Gopher, though.

Because it retrieves facts from memory in a way that’s analogized to a gopher retrieving objects.

It's the name of a town in QLD.