Why are so many AI systems named after Muppets? by James Vincent via @Verge

ELMo, BERT, Grover, Big BIRD, Rosita, RoBERTa, two ERNIEs (three if you include ERNIE 2.0), and KERMIT. It’s an inside joke that says a lot about AI development.

Until I read this I had never made the connection (not sure why) as it's obvious when you think about it.