The name
Deinos (δεινός) is the ancient Greek word for something wondrous and terrible at once. The company is named for it.
What is Deinos?
Deinos is an AI company. It builds companies that put AI to work, and it answers for everything they do. Each company has a named person who signs for what it does, a published way to stop it and a way to appeal. 19 companies are in formation, across Deinos and its creative house, Of It's Own.
What does deinos mean?
It means wondrous and terrible in the same word. Translators have rendered it as wondrous, terrible, formidable, strange, uncanny, dangerous and marvelous. All of them are right. That is the point.
Where does it come from?
From Sophocles' Antigone, lines 332–333. The chorus sings: “Many things are deinos, and nothing is more deinos than a human being.”
πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει
Literal rendering. R. C. Jebb translates the line as “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.”
Why name an AI company after it?
The chorus says it about us, not about machines. The power was always ours. So is the responsibility. That is why the company's founding line is “We are aware. We are responsible.” It is a statement made by people about the power of what they build. It is not a claim that any machine is aware.
Why Antigone?
Creon, the king, decrees that a dead man stays unburied. His sister Antigone covers him with dust anyway. When she is caught, she does not hide. She says a decree cannot cancel what is owed.
Antigone saves no one in the play. Deinos does not borrow her as a mascot. It borrows her question: who answers when power is wrong?
Is Deinos related to dinosaurs?
Only through the word. The anatomist Richard Owen joined deinos to sauros, lizard, to coin “dinosaur”. The company takes the word from Antigone, not from paleontology.