In an idle moment, I thought I’d explore the space of ridiculously bad ai company names. Literally the very first dystopia I thought of already has three ai companies named after it, and it hardly seemed worth exploring any further.
Because no one has got around to repealing poe’s law, I cannot tell if these are a bunch of idiot techbros, or people taking the piss out of idiot techbros, so I leave you to judge for yourself. Behold, people who think that “we tortured a child to bring you glossy web UIs” is a great corporate image:
AI-driven software development. Enterprise platforms delivered at startup speed.
I think they’re a consultancy? “One developer with AI produces what a 30-person agency does. 10+ production platforms in under two years.”
Omelas is the maker of Atreus, the leading AI research companion for foreign policy, national security, and geopolitical risk. Atreus has access to the Omelas database, multidomain intelligence, and unique research methods, yielding unparalleled insights in minutes.
“Atreus is the AI workbench purpose-built for intelligence work, fusing unique feeds, open-source intelligence, commercial data, satellite imagery and telemetry data into reports your analysts can act on immediately” which I guess means that they’re palantir wannabes, with the USP that they’ve grossly misunderstood le guin instead of Tolkien.
Omelas builds software across privacy, social connection, developer tools, and AI — designed and engineered in the Netherlands.
Another consultancy. They claim they make “thoughtful products”, hopefully with more thought than they put into their branding. Proof that inability to understand fantasy and sci-fi isn’t limited to silicon valley, or native english speakers.
Oh no! Like don’t you google a name before choosing it?
Who even has time for that? Do you think that the people behind palantir, icarus and sauron have time to read google summaries? They’re too busy remaking the world!
Anyway, if you’re successful enough you’ll eclipse the original source in terms of importance and all the search engine summaries will be about you anyway, so any time spent learning anything before that will have been completely wasted.
Thiel has spoken enough on his love of Tolkien that it’s pretty clear he’s a big fan of the books, meaning he knows what he’s naming. A lot of these people are actually pretty devoted fans, they just think Saruman/Sauron/etc had bad PR.
“The ones who walk away from Omelas described a utopia —”
good enough! ship it!
@gerikson @rmhogervorst
Their favourite bit of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas was when Omelas Jones jumped in the OmelasMobile and yelled “It’s Omelassin’ Time” and sped away in a cloud of tiresmoke