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I think it would be funny to have a grad student named Claude for the hilarious ambiguity it would create.
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Yeah, and we thought the most unlucky people were the ones named Alexa.
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Or those named Karen...
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Rajesh here
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It took me quite some time to realize what an utterly presumptuous product name Claude Code actually is, but only because Shannon is rarely mentioned with his first name. It's golden calf levels of hubris, even more so if you consider how incapable it was on release. It's like renaming calc.exe Einstein. Incredibly poor taste, but entirely in line with AI tech bro mentality.
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That linkage never occurred to me, or, I suspect, them. Claude use to be a reasonably common name. I have an uncle Claude. Why do you believe they named it after Shannon in particular?
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It seems to be a widely repeated "fact" which can't be traced to anything particularly authoritative:

https://archive.is/pt5fQ

https://britannica.com/topic/Claude-AI

Looks like the 2023 NYT article started it, and it uses this as reference:

> depending on which employee you ask, was either a nerdy tribute to the 20th-century mathematician Claude Shannon

Personally I always associated it with the silent protagonist from GTA3.

https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Claude

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Yeah, especially since most Americans don't know how to properly pronounce Claude.
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Hmm, Claude Shannon was an American (the model is ostensibly named after him), so maybe how he pronounced it would be the correct pronunciation.

That said, every language on earth will adapt foreign words into its phonology. The alternative would be to adopt the phonology of every language that loaned a word into your language.

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