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I just can’t believe nobody at the company has enough courage to tell their leadership that their naming scheme is completely stupid and insane. Four is greater
by nickysielicki 1y ago
I just can’t believe nobody at the company has enough courage to tell their leadership that their naming scheme is completely stupid and insane. Four is greater than three, and so four should be better than three. The point of a name is to describe something so that you don’t confuse your users, not to be cute.
- browningstreet 1y agoAt Techcrunch AI last week, the OpenAI guy started his presentation by acknowledging that OpenAI knows their naming is a problem and they're working on it, but it won't be fixed immediately.
- moomin 1y agoI know they have a deep relationship with Microsoft, but perhaps they shouldn’t have used Microsoft’s product naming department.
- simonw 1y agoSam Altman has said the same thing on Twitter a few times. https://x.com/sama/status/1911906570835022319 https://x.com/sama/status/1911906570835022319 > how about we fix our model naming by this summer and everyone gets a few more months to make fun of us (which we very much deserve) until then?
- nickysielicki 1y agoI’d prefer for them to just fix it asap instead and then keep the existing endpoints around for a year as aliases.
- lobsterthief 1y agoThey will definitely keep the endpoint aliases around for years. No real cost in doing so.
- asah 1y agoHow about they ask ChatGPT for help !
- MallocVoidstar 1y agoThe reason their naming scheme is so bad is because their initial attempts at GPT-5 failed in training. It was supposed to be done ~1 year ago. Because they'd promised that GPT-5 would be vastly more intelligent than GPT-4, they couldn't just name any random model "GPT-5", so they suddenly had to start naming things differently. So now there's GPT-4.5, GPT-4.1, the o-series, ...
- kaoD 1y agoSurely there's a less stupid way than naming two very different models o4 and 4o.
- transcriptase 1y agoWhat’s worse is that the app doesn’t even have descriptions. As if I’m supposed to memorize the use case for each based on: GPT-4o o3 o4-mini o4-mini-high GPT-4.5 GPT-4.1 GPT-4.1-mini
- koakuma-chan 1y agoJust use o4-mini for everything
- ralfd 1y agoWhy not o3?
- thimabi 1y agoIn my experience, o4-mini has been fast and accurate enough for most use cases. If needed, I use o4-mini-high. I just bother to use o3 when there’s a gnarly issue to solve and I can wait its long response times.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoBecause it's slow
- occamschainsaw 1y agoEven o3 can't figure out the naming scheme. When asked to generate names that would be easier to use by non-technical people, it assumed o3 and o4 are the smallest models: ``` Below is one straightforward, user-friendly approach you could adopt. It keeps two dimensions only—generation and tier—and reserves an optional “optimisation” suffix for special-purpose variants (e.g. vision, coding, long-context). ⸻ 1. Core conventions Element Purpose Example values Generation Major architectural release. Keep a whole number; use “.1”, “.2”… for mid-cycle improvements. 4, 4.1, 4.5 Tier Rough capability / cost band, easy to interpret. Lite, Standard, Pro, Ultra Suffix (optional) Special optimisation or domain specialisation. -LongCtx, -Vision, -Code Why this works • No ambiguous letters or numerics – “o3” can be read as “03” or “oz”; avoid that entirely. • Self-explanatory language – non-technical users recognise “Lite” versus “Pro” instantly. • Scalable – new minor rev? bump the generation (4.2). Need a cheaper size? add a Nano tier without disturbing the rest. ⸻ 2. Applying it to your current list Current name Proposed new name Rationale GPT-4o GPT-4 Standard Baseline flagship of the 4-series. o3 GPT-4 Lite Same generation, lowest tier. o4-mini GPT-4 Lite+ (or GPT-4 Lite LongCtx if that’s the point) Indicates “Lite” family but a bit more capable; “+” or a suffix clarifies how. o4-mini-high GPT-4 Standard LongCtx (or GPT-4 Lite Pro) Pick one dimension: either it’s still “Lite” but higher context, or it has moved into “Standard”. GPT-4.5 GPT-4.5 Standard Mid-cycle architectural upgrade, default tier. GPT-4.1 GPT-4.1 Standard Ditto. GPT-4.1-mini GPT-4.1 Lite Same generation, smaller/cheaper option. ⸻ 3. Quick style guide for future models 1. Stick to two words (or two words + optional suffix) GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5 Lite-Vision – still readable at a glance. 2. Reserve extra punctuation for special cases only Hyphens or the “+” symbol should signal meaning, not be decorative. 3. Publish a public matrix A small table in docs or the dashboard that maps Generation × Tier → context length, cost, latency eliminates guesswork. ⸻ One-line summary GPT- [-Specialisation] keeps names short, descriptive and future-proof—so even non-technical users can tell instantly which model suits their needs. ```
- aetherspawn 1y agoCame here to say this, the naming scheme is ridiculous and is getting more impossible to follow each day. For example the other day they released a supposedly better model with a lower number..
- aetherspawn 1y agoI’d honestly prefer they just have 3 personas of varying cost/intelligence: Sam, Elmo and Einstein or something, and then tack on the date, elmo-2025-1 and silently delete the old ones.
- dmos62 1y agoIf you obfuscate the naming, you obfuscate the value proposition, and people become easier to mislead into choosing an overly expensive model. Same as with Intel CPUs, or many many other hardware products.