Naming things is hard.

Shortly after ChatGPT launched at the end of November, I decided to build a site to share ChatGPT examples and eventually be the home to educational content to help people learn more about GPT.

To my surprise, there were a lot of relevant available .com domain names related to GPT, so I registered a bunch and asked for suggestions on Twitter for which to use for the site:

I'm working on a new site to teach people about GPT that will include tutorials, examples, tools, news, and more. Which of these names do you like best for it?

— Matt Mazur (@mhmazur) December 5, 2022

And so I chose LearnGPT and for the last month and a half that’s been the name of the site.

On its surface, it’s a great name for a site focused on teaching people about GPT.

But, it has some issues:

• People kept referring to the site as “Learn” in conversation because saying “Learn GPT” is clunky. “How’s ‘learn’ doing?” (looking at you Dave…)
• In two years will we still be talking about GPT or one of the many other Large Language Models (LLM) coming out? Incorporating content on the site about them would be awkward if the name of the site referenced GPT.
• And most importantly, the name “Learn GPT” meant that the site would forever be constrained to being an educational site about GPT. That likely meant monetizing it down the road via an info product which wasn’t interesting to me at all, so much so that it almost led me to shut the site down.

The hunt for a new name

I wrote a little Ruby script to search for available .ai domain names, hoping to find one to rename LearnGPT to:

Here's a list of 800 decent available .ai domain names for your browsing pleasure: https://t.co/CBTjojA8Cy – reply with crazy product ideas you have for any of these

— Matt Mazur (@mhmazur) January 11, 2023

Then it occurred to me… I already own a great domain I can use for the site.

EmergentMind

Around 2014 I got very interested in the concept of emergence and created a site called Emergent Mind to build little projects to explore the space more. In the end I wound up creating 10 interactive visualizations: Boids, Game of Life, Cellular Automata, Tree Growing, Biomorophs, The Evolution of Color, Animorphs, Forming a Planet, The Perceptron, and Neural Network.

You can still play around with them if you’d like courtesy of Archive.org:

It dawned on me recently that the name “Emergent Mind” was a great description for the end result of these Large Language Models like GPT: a mind of sorts that emerges from the machine learning process.

I didn’t own the Twitter handle @EmergentMind but thankfully its owner was kind of enough to give it to me for free which solidified my decision to use it as the new name for LearnGPT.

What’s next for EmergentMind?

In the course of integrating GPT into Preceden recently, I realized just how difficult prompt engineering can be. You might have some task in mind for GPT or another LLM, but what’s the best way to ask the question to get a great answer? It’s as much of an art as a science, and I think there’s an opportunity to build a community around this nascent skill.

So, instead of focusing on GPT, I’ve decided to focus on building a site for people interested in prompt engineering. Imagine educational content, tools, and a Stack Overflow-like community all built from the ground up, infused with AI, to help people learn to communicate with these new AI technologies more effectively.

And the name is flexible enough that if that prompt engineering direction doesn’t make sense long term (will prompt engineering still be a thing in a few years?), it’s easy enough to pivot without another name change.

Here we go 🚀.