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.
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.
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.
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?
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.