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Serious question: If it's an improved 2.5 model, why don't they call it version 2.6? Seems annoying to have to remember if you're using the old 2.5 or the new 2
by herpderperator 1y ago
Serious question: If it's an improved 2.5 model, why don't they call it version 2.6? Seems annoying to have to remember if you're using the old 2.5 or the new 2.5. Kind of like when Apple released the third-gen iPad many years ago and simply called it the "new iPad" without a number.
- skerit 1y agoThat's why people called the second version of Sonnet v3.5 simply v3.6, and Anthropic acknowledged that by naming the next version v3.7
- Aeolun 1y agoOnly Anthropic has a slightly understandable version scheme.
- qafy 1y ago2.5 is not the version number, it's the generation of the underlying model architecture. Think of it like the trim level on a Mazda 3 hatchback. Mazda already has the Mazda 3 Sport in their lineup, then later they release the Mazda 3 Turbo which is much faster. When they release this new version of the vehicle its not called the Mazda 4... that would be an entirely different vehicle based on a new platform and powertrain etc (if it existed). The new vehicle is just a new trim level / visual refresh of the existing Mazda 3. That's why Google names it like this, but I agree its dumb. Semver would be easier.
- pests 1y agoGonna steal this to help explain to non tech friends when it comes up again.
- someguyiguess 1y agoI’d say it’s more like naming your Operating System off of the kernel version number.
- alwillis 1y agoIt's pretty common to refer to models by the month and year they were released. For example, the latest Gemini 2.5 Flash is known as "google/gemini-2.5-flash-preview-09-2025" [1]. [1]: https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-2.5-flash-preview-09-2025 https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-2.5-flash-preview-09-202...
- herpderperator 1y agoOr, you know, just Gemini 2.6 Flash. I don't recall the 2.5 version having a date associated with it when it came out, though maybe they are using dates now. In marketing, at least, it's always known as Gemini 2.5 Flash/Pro.
- kingo55 1y agoIt had a date, but I also agree this is extremely confusing. Even semver 2.5.1 would be clearer IMO.
- vitorgrs 1y agoIt always had dates... They release multiple versions and update regularly. Not sure if this is the first 2.5 Flash update, but pretty sure Pro had a few updates as well... This is also the case with OpenAI and their models. Pretty standard I guess. They don't change the versioning, because I guess they don't consider it to be "a new model trained from scratch".
- relatedtitle 1y agoI'm pretty sure Google just does that for preview models and they drop the date from the name when it's released.
- cpeterso 1y agoIf they're going to include the month and year as part of the version number, they should at least use big endian dates like gemini-2.5-flash-preview-2025-09 instead of 09-2025.
- someguyiguess 1y ago
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoMaybe they’re signalling it’s more of a bug fix?
- manquer 1y ago2.5.1 then . semantic versioning works for most scenarios.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoWould that automatically roll over anyone pinging 2.5 via their API?
- manquer 1y agoIf you want role over then you could specify ^2.5.0 or 2.5.x if you want to pin then it would be 2.5.0 This is all solved for a long time now , llm vendors seems to have unlearnt versioning principles. This is fairly typical - marketing and business wants different things to do with version number than what version number systems are good at .
- dgacmu 1y agoI suspect Google doesn't want to have to maintain multiple sub-versions. It's easier to serve one 2x popular model than two models where there's flux between the load on each, since these things have a non-trivial time to load into GPU/TPU memory for serving.
- manquer 1y agoEven if switching quickly was a challenge[1], they are using these models in their own products not just selling them in a service, the first party applications could quite easily adapt to this by switching quickly to the available model and freeing up the in-demand one. This is the entire premise behind the cloud, the reason it was Amazon did it first, they had the largest workloads at the time before Web 2.0 and SaaS was a thing. Only businesses with large first party apps succeeded in the cloud provider space, companies like HP, IBM all failed and their time to failure strongly correlated to their amount of first party apps they operated. i.e. These apps anyway needed to keep a lot of idle capacity for peak demand capacity they could now monetize and co-mingle in the cloud. LLMs as a service is not any different from S3 launched 20 years ago. --- [1] It isn't, at the scale they are operating these models it shouldn't matter at all, it is not individual GPUs or machines that make a difference in load handling at all. Only few users are going to explicitly pining a specific patch version for the rest they can serve either one that is available immediately or cheaply.
- cubefox 1y agoThat would be even more confusing because then it is unclear whether 2.6 Flash is better than 2.5 Pro.