There is a long history of bad naming conventions in the field of AI, including “artificial intelligence” itself imo. (What is “intelligence” here? It’s more like “automation” or “automated problem solving”.)

What really happens is that we figure out something that works, sometimes inspired by some biological thing or neuroscience thing.

Examples: neural network, attention, reasoning, hallucination, agents, experts in “mixture of experts”.

And then we go to name it, and rather than reaching for some three letter acronym we sometimes borrow a more catchy term.

I almost never means the original research was confused about what is going on. And in some cases we eventually strip away things from the original, like in neural nets which used to have a more biologically inspired activation function but we found out that ReLU works just as well because the important thing was the non linearity not the sigmoid.