What Adam Is Reading · A Thought Experiment
If we named AI models the way biologists name living things, what would the names look like, and how would they survive a new release every month?
Every organism gets a two part Latin name: a genus (the group) and a species (the member). Homo sapiens is genus Homo, species sapiens, or "wise human." A third word, if present, is a subspecies, a regional population that differs a bit but can still interbreed. Below that, breeders and microbiologists add their own finer labels: cultivars for plants, strains for bacteria and viruses. The trick is that each layer changes on its own clock. The species name lasts centuries. The strain name lasts a season.
Ingenium loquax. Ingenium is Latin for innate talent or genius, and it is the root of both "engine" and "engineer," so it names the cleverness and the machine in one word. Loquax means "talkative." It describes what the organism actually does: produce fluent language, at volume. (Ingenium sapiens was considered. Wisdom is pending, as it is for us.)
A full name, read left to right:
| Rank | In biology | For AI | Changes | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Genus | A group of closely related species | Machines that think in language at all | Once | Ingenium |
| Species | Members that can interbreed | Models that share an architecture (today, the transformer). Test: can you merge or distill one into the other? | Rarely | Ingenium loquax |
| Subspecies | A regional population with its own traits | A lab's lineage: its own training data, methods, and house style | When a lab forks off | I. loquax anthropicum |
| Cultivar | A variety selected by breeders for a purpose, named in plain language in single quotes | A product line, shaped by human feedback toward a personality and purpose | Every year or two | I. loquax anthropicum 'Claude' |
| Variety | A stable variant within a species | A model retrained for one job (clinical, coding, legal) | As needed | var. medicus |
| Strain | A specific isolate, as in flu or bacteria (H5N1, K-12) | A specific release with a version number | Every few months | str. Opus 4.1 |
| Holotype | The single preserved specimen that defines a species, kept in a museum drawer | The frozen weights of a release. Nobody may alter them either. | Never | the checkpoint file |
All of these are the same species. They differ at the subspecies level (which lab raised them) and below.
The point of the layers is that each one moves at its own speed. The strain changes monthly, the cultivar yearly, the subspecies when a lab forks, the species when someone ships something that is not a transformer. Medicine already does this: ICD gets a new major revision once a generation and new codes every October. The name stays readable because most of it stays still.