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by jackblemming 1201 days ago
They're the real OpenAI! Great team.
1 comments

If only they had chosen a better name... "Eleuther" is hard to pronounce correctly for someone who doesn't know the word.
One measure of likelihood for success is how well the name rolls off the tongue.
Yeah for a Coca Cola type of product not a research organization filled with people who could care less
You mean like Betamax vs. VHS? ;)
how do you pronounce it correctly
If it's from the greek word for freedom (ελευθερία) then i guess elefther: ele (like electric) f the (like thesis) r.
The English convention is to pronounce -eu- in Greek words as /ju/, not /ef/.
Yes, basically Greek words in English are pronounced as Latin loanwords, according to how the Greek words would have been pronounced in Latin around AD 1 (except that ph and th, but not ch, are pronounced as fricatives in English). Greek αυ and ευ were still pronounced as diphthongs at the time.
My name is Ελευθέριος and I transliterate it as Eleftherios in English.
There's a "standard" way of how greek words should be transliterated in English (ELOT 743). You can test it here https://www.passport.gov.gr/passports/GrElotConverter/GrElot...

And yes, Eleftherios is the correct transliteration :)

Where are you getting an /f/ sound from?

Edit: Ah, it seems the digraph "ευ" is pronounced /ef/ in Modern Greek, despite (by convention) being transliterated "eu".

Correct. Thee same pronunciation exists in ancient greek for example ευ ζην is ef zin (the good life).

Also the ευ situation is a little more complex ie sometimes it is pronunciated as ev (depending if the next letter is a vowel).

Wikipedia suggests that "ευ" was pronounced /eu̯/ in ancient greek[0]. My suspicion is that "ευ ζην" is an Ancient Greek "fixed phrase" which is pronounced with Modern Greek phonology.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_phonology#Diphth...

Huh, this seems to be the same linguistic phenomenon observed in British English with the word "lieutenant" but perhaps independently evolved.
I'm just going to keep saying YOO-luh-tuhr, thank you very much.
Reminds me of Yog-Sothoth, which would be a great name for an anthropomorphized statistical model...

> Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.

You laugh. But, that has been the meme about GPT for a bit now

https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1625850766039842824?c...

RLHF = Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Reminds me of how there was a post on LessWrong some good decade ago, with a chilling premise: we somehow manage to get a safe, trustworthy, correct AI working, and as we fire it up and ask to tell us about our world, it starts talking about things we somehow can't perceive...
I couldn't find the IPA even in Wiktionary, but I found out where it comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleutheromania
Actually the origin is this word (with the last two letters transposed), and the Wikipedia article gives IPA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleutheria

Like the Eleuthera island in the Bahamas I would think: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3-F-7WKXG14

So Eh-Luther AI.

I’d been saying E Luther. Is that all wrong?
I assume similar to luthier?
Which is everyone