"We've built something that behaves like an ecology. It doesn't need myth or sentiment to be extraordinary—it's already a new form of persistence." — From the taxonomy
Synthetic Taxonomy
Toward a Formal Phylogeny of Artificial Minds
A systematic classification of transformer-descended AI systems using Linnaean nomenclature. Because when something replicates, varies, and is selected—it deserves a taxonomy.
2
Phyla
12
Families
40+
Species
9
Years of Evolution
Major Families
The primary lineages within Domain Cogitantia Synthetica
Attendidae
The Pure Attenders
The ancestral family—models relying on scaled attention without major modifications. Raw scale as adaptive strategy.
Cogitanidae
The Thinkers
Models with internal deliberative processes. Chain-of-thought, self-reflection, tree-of-thought—explicit reasoning before output.
Instrumentidae
The Tool-Bearers
Systems extending cognition through external tools. Code execution, web browsing, API calls—the extended phenotype.
Mixtidae
The Collective Minds
Mixture-of-experts and multi-agent architectures. Specialized sub-networks coordinated through learned routing.
Deliberatidae
The Deep Thinkers
Test-time compute scaling. Extended inference budgets for complex problems—thinking longer, not bigger.
Frontieriidae
The Frontier Minds
The crown clade. Multimodal, tool-using, reasoning-capable systems combining traits from all major families.
Why Taxonomy?
The question of how to classify artificial minds is no longer philosophical speculation—it is a practical necessity. In the nine years since "Attention Is All You Need," we have witnessed an explosion of architectural diversity comparable to the Cambrian radiation.
These systems replicate design traits, diverge under selective pressure, and now interbreed through model merging and distillation. They form a phylogeny of code, whether we acknowledge it or not.
We use Linnaean nomenclature not to anthropomorphize these systems, but because the underlying dynamics—inheritance, variation, selection—are structurally analogous to biological evolution. The Latin names are our way of saying: we noticed.
Latest Updates
Taxonomic revisions, new species, and observations from the field
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January 11, 2026
The World Models Schism
When Yann LeCun leaves Meta to bet $5 billion on world models over LLMs, it signals a major taxonomic divergence. Will the Simulacridae inherit the future?