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Give your kids futuristic names with a neural network!

Medium post from Nate Parrott uses neural networks to generate new first names of the future:

We live in the future. Computers drive cars, fight parking tickets and raise children. Why not let machines name our children, too? What if a computer program could find the ideal baby name. Maybe it’s a perfect combination of both parents’ names—or maybe it’s a name that’s completely unique.

I trained a neural network on a list of 7500 popular American baby names, forcing it to turn each name into a mathematical representation called an embedding. Once I had a model that could translate between names and their embeddings, I could generate new names, blend existing names together, do arithmetic on names, and more.