You’ve just spent millions of dollars, countless computing hours, and untold gallons of cool water steeping a neural network in the sum of internet knowledge. Now, just one question remains: What do you call this thing?

That’s where David Placek and his naming agency, Lexicon Branding, might come in. If you don’t know the agency’s own name, you definitely know some of the names it’s coined: Febreze, Dasani, BlackBerry, Sonos, the Subaru Outback.

Situated in the houseboat haven of Sausalito, California, the small agency has worked with most of the tech giants jostling over AI supremacy on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. And lately, Placek has been spending a lot of time thinking about what to call various chatbots.

After “numerous requests from companies to name new AI technology brands,” Lexicon recently polled around 350 consumers and developers in the US and Germany to try to understand what makes a good moniker for this new wave of generative AI models.

Based on the findings, Placek might encourage clients to use something that brings to mind a piece of the natural world, like Meta’s Llama models, as a way to “convey a sense of simplicity, calm, and ease,” according to the report. Words that are “relatable” and “capable,” and include a commonly used suffix or prefix, like Co-, as in Microsoft Copilot or Cohere, can connote “collaboration, competence, and a sense of being in control,” the findings suggest.

“It’s better to make these things approachable and able for the human mind to process in a really simple way,” Placek told Tech Brew. “Natural would be a good way to do it. Until that becomes a trend, and all of a sudden, there’s mountain this and sky that and ocean that.”

Keep reading here.—PK

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Rethink possibility.

At Baltimore’s Pimlico Race Course, every split second matters.

That’s true for the field of thoroughbreds that will race for the $2 million Preakness Stakes purse on Saturday, and for the tens of thousands of spectators who will consume nearly 50 gigabytes of mobile data during the event.

In data-usage terms, that’s the equivalent of streaming 10,000 songs or 100 hours of video, all condensed into a 12-hour period and concentrated around the track’s one-mile dirt oval.

According to Verizon Wireless’s Brian Dunn, an associate director of network operations, providing this level of connectivity takes a measure of advance planning as well as boots-on-the-ground preparation.

“It’s just a lot of extra capacity that we need to provide for our customers,” he told Tech Brew. “Our standard network will get loaded. So it’s really just a little bump there to ensure that we don’t have any disruptions in service.”

Keep reading here.—KG

It’s human nature to fear the change that new technologies may introduce. The Greek philosopher Socrates argued that the new-fangled invention of writing would weaken our memories, according to Plato’s Phaedrus (which is, ironically, a written document).

But a little time and exposure may assuage these fears. This appears to be the case with finance leaders and the latest advancements in artificial intelligence, a recent survey by SAP Concur suggests.

The travel and expense-management platform surveyed 300 CFOs and senior finance leaders in March, and found that 27% of respondents view AI as a threat to their own job, down by more than half from August 2023, when SAP Concur reported that 68% felt their positions were threatened by AI.

“Anxiety about the existential threat from AI has eased as CFOs get used to the new technology,” Christopher Juneau, head of SAP Concur’s market strategy, wrote in the report.

Keep reading on CFO Brew.—AZ

How’s your hiring eye? HR, talent, and business leaders should be skilled at spotting great talent. Beamery’s Spark Live 2024 is the virtual conference diving into the world of global talent with star keynote speakers like US Soccer Hall of Famer Jill Ellis and AG1’s President and COO Kat Cole. Save your seat.

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

Search update: A few weeks ago in this very spot, we wrote about Kagi, an ad-free search engine that costs $10 a month for the privilege of not having to sift through a stack of sponcon to find what you’re looking for online.

Today we’re back to say that it is so, so worth it. We blew through the free trial and immediately surrendered our credit-card details to use it in perpetuity. (Given the nature of our work, we were even able to expense it. Thanks, Morning Brew!)

All that’s to say, whether you’re a garden-variety internet user and consumer or a tech journalist, it’s worth considering if your search life is worth paying for (we think it is).

Social test: After our successful test of a new search engine, we’re now going to try out a new social network. Thursday morning, we popped open Instagram to be served a post about a—we are not making this up—”frozen Nerds Cluster cocktail.” It was blue, it had Nerds on top of it, it was grotesque.

Does Instagram know what we want? Do we know what we want? Perhaps not, which is why the next thing we encountered on our phone on Thursday—this Wired article about Maven, a new social network backed by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams—intrigued.

The platform, Wired reports, “trades likes and follows for algorithms designed to foster serendipity and deep discussion.” Consider our interest piqued. We’ll report back in a few weeks if it’s as much of a success as Kagi.