Great post and I think this extends to machine learning names, although not that severe. Maybe it all started with Adam. When I say “I used Adam for optimization” this means I used a random opaque thing for optimization. If I say “I used an ADAptive Moment estimation based optimizer” it becomes more transparent. Using human names or random nouns has been a trend. Lora, Sora, Dora, Bert, Bart, Robert, Roberta, Dall-e, Dino, Sam… With varying capitalization for each letter. Even the Transformer. What does it transform exactly? But it gets worse. Here is a list of architectures that may replace Transformers [0]: Linformer, Longformer, Reformer, Performer, Griffin, BigBird, Mamba, Jamba... What’s going on?
[0]https://huggingface.co/blog/ProCreations/transformers-are-ge...