Many top global companies were called named something entirely different in their early days — Amazon was once called Cadabra, Google was once called BackRub, and Instagram started off while being called Burbn. And if it hadn’t been for Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI might’ve ended up being called “Cogito”.
The OpenAI co-founders had discussed calling their company “Cogito” before they settled on OpenAI. Current OpenAI President Greg Brockman had come up with the name, and Sam Altman and Elon Musk had both liked it. But Ilya Sutskever — who’d become the Chief Scientist at OpenAI — wasn’t convinced. Sutskever — who was born in Russia and grew up in Israel — didn’t seem to know what Cogito meant, and that seemed to nix the name.
Here’s the chat from 2015 that was just released in a court case where Greg Brockman suggested the name
Greg Brockman
What do you think Cogito as a name?Ilya Sutskever
Not a huge fanGreg Brockman
n000000! (elon + sam both liked it)Ilya Sutskever
What about you? 🙂Greg Brockman
i came up with it 🙂Ilya Sutskever
Oops!Greg Brockman
haha but, i like that its relevant, pretty unbranded, and has good connotations of thinking/individualism i don’t like that its hard to know how to pronounce.Ilya Sutskever
Ah, is it Latin?Greg Brockman
ah yeah. “cogito ergo sum”Ilya Sutskever
AhGreg Brockman
descartes’ “i think therefore i am”Ilya Sutskever
I can see why everyone liked it
I had friends who named their company “whetlab”
I didn’t like it at once since I didn’t know what whet meant
If you think that enough people know what cogito means than i support itGreg Brockman
elon says: Not bad. Sounds kinda cute. Most people won’t get the latin, but the ones we want to join will.
I’d support that.
(or will be russian :))Ilya Sutskever
Knowledge of Latin is independent of knowledge of MLGreg Brockman hah, yeah. but more seriously, i think cogito is well-known enough
Ilya Sutskever
Maybe it’s ok Then I’m ok with itGreg Brockman
cool
Ilya seemed the least enthused about the four over “Cogito” — he apparently hadn’t heard of the word — and it appears that this caused the name to be dropped. The founders chose to eventually go with a much simpler name — OpenAI — which at that time reflected what the company was trying to become. OpenAI was trying to become an open and independent alternative to Google, which then had a big lead in the AI space. As things turned out, OpenAI didn’t end up remaining very open — it raised money from Microsoft, and hasn’t released the weights of any model since GPT-2. Things might not have gone very differently had the founders chosen to name the company “Cogito”, but OpenAI would’ve at least avoided the many barbs that come its way over the contradiction of the “Open” in its name and its policies on open-source.