[ryanhecht]

> While OpenAI o1 remains our broader general knowledge reasoning model, OpenAI o3-mini provides a specialized alternative for technical domains requiring precision and speed.

I feel like this naming scheme is growing a little tired. o1 is for general knowledge reasoning, o3-mini replaces o1-mini but might be more specialized than o1 for certain technical domains...the "o" in "4o" is for "omni" (referring to its multimodality) but the reasoning models start with "o" ...but they can't use "o2" for trademark reasons so they skip straight to "o3" ...the word salad is getting really hard to follow!

[zamadatix]

The -mini postfix makes perfect sense, probably even clearer than the old "turbo" wording. Naturally, the latest small model may be better than larger older models... but not always and not necessarily in everything. What you'd expect from a -mini model is exactly what is delivered.

The non-reasoning line was also pretty straightforward. Newer base models get a larger prefix number and some postfixes like 'o' were added to signal specific features in each model variant. Great!

Where things went of the rails was specifically when they decided to also name the reasoning models with an 'o' for separate reasons but now as the prefix at the same time as starting a separate linear sequence but now as the postfix. I wonder if we'll end up with both a 4o and o4...

[lolinder]

> I wonder if we'll end up with both a 4o and o4...

The perplexing thing is that someone has to have said that, right? It has to have been brought up in some meeting when they were brainstorming names that if you have 4o and o1 with the intention of incrementing o1 you'll eventually end up with an o4.

Where they really went off the rails was not just bailing when they realized they couldn't use o2. In that moment they had the chance to just make o1 a one-off weird name and go down a different path for its final branding.

OpenAI just struggles with names in general, though. ChatGPT was a terrible name picked by engineers for a product that wasn't supposed to become wildly successful, and they haven't really improved at it since.

[viraptor]

The obvious solution could be to just keep skipping the even numbers and go to o5.

[arrowleaf]

Or further the hype and name it o9.

[cruffle_duffle]

Why not let ChatGPT decide the naming? Surely it will be replacing humans at this task any day now?

[macrolime]

And multimodal o4 should be o4o.

[tmnvdb]

Probably they are doing so well because there are not endless meetings on customer friendly names

[unsupp0rted]

This is definitely intentional.

You can like Sama or dislike him, but he knows how to market a product. Maybe this is a bad call on his part, but it is a call.

[thorum]

Not really. They’re successful because they created one of the most interesting products in human history, not because they have any idea how to brand it.

[marko-k]

If that were the case, they’d be neck and neck with Anthropic and Claude. But ChatGPT has far more market share and name recognition, especially among normies. Branding clearly plays a huge role.

[cj]

ChatGPT is still benefitting from first mover advantage. Which they’ve leveraged to get to the position they’re at today.

Over time, competitors catch up and first mover advantage melts away.

I wouldn’t attribute OpenAI’s success to any extremely smart marketing moves. I think a big part of their market share grab was simply going (and staying) viral for a long time. Manufacturing virality is notoriously difficult (and based on the usability and poor UI of ChatGPT early versions, it feels like they got lucky in a lot of ways)

[bobxmax]

I think that has more to do with the multiple year head start and multiple tens of billions of dollars in funding advantage.

[joshstrange]

And you think that is due to their model naming?

[jcheng]

I prefer Anthropic's models but ChatGPT (the web interface) is far superior to Claude IMHO. Web search, long-term memory, and chat history sharing are hard to give up.

[KeplerBoy]

That's first mover advantage.

[FridgeSeal]

I think it’s success in spite of branding, not because of it.

This naming scheme is a dumpster fire. Every other comment is trying to untangle what the actual hierarchy of model performance is.

[mrbungie]

That's like making a second reading and appealing to authority.

The naming is bad. Other people already said it you can "google" stuff, you can "deepseek" something, but to "chatgpt" sounds weird.

The model naming is even weirder, like, did they really avoid o2 because of oxigen?

[sumedh]

> but to "chatgpt" sounds weird.

People just say it differently, they say "ask chatgpt"

[gwd]

I normally use Claude, but "Ask Claude", but unless it's someone who knows me well, I say "Ask ChatGPT", or it's just not as claer; and I don't think it's primarily due to popularity.

[mrbungie]

Obviously they do. That's the whole point.

[kingnothing]

They really need someone in marketing.

If the model is for technical stuff, then call it the technical model. How is anyone supposed to know what these model names mean?

The only page of theirs attempting to explain this is a total disaster. https://platform.openai.com/docs/models

[TeMPOraL]

> How is anyone supposed to know what these model names mean?

Normies don't have to know - ChatGPT app focuses UX around capabilities and automatically picks the appropriate model for capabilities requested; you can see which model you're using and change it, but don't need to.

As for the techies and self-proclaimed "AI experts" - OpenAI is the leader in the field, and one of the most well-known and talked about tech companies in history. Whether to use, praise or criticize, this group of users is motivated to figure it out on their own.

It's the privilege of fashionable companies. They could name the next model ↂ-↊↋, and it'll take all of five minutes for everyone in tech (and everyone on LinkedIn) to learn how to type in the right Unicode characters.

EDIT: Originally I wrote \Omega-↊↋, but apparently HN's Unicode filter extends to Greek alphabet now? 'dang?

[relaxing]

What if you use ASCII 234? Ω (edit: works!)

[TeMPOraL]

Thanks! I copied mine from Wikipedia (like I typically do with Unicode characters I rarely use), where it is also Ω - the same character. For a moment I was worried I somehow got it mixed up with the Ohm symbol but I didn't. Not sure what happened here.

[n2d4]

> They really need someone in marketing.

Who said this is not intentional? It seems to work well given that people are hyped every time there's a release, no matter how big the actual improvements are — I'm pretty sure "o3-mini" works better for that purpose than "GPT 4.1.3"

[fkyoureadthedoc]

> I'm pretty sure "o3-mini" works better for that purpose than "GPT 4.1.3"

Why would the marketing team of all people call it GPT 4.1.3?

[n2d4]

They wouldn't! They would call it o3-mini, even though GPT 4.1.3 may or may not "make more sense" from a technical perspective.

[golly_ned]

Yes, this $300Bn company generating +$3.4Bn in revenue needs to hire marketing expert. They can begin by sourcing ideas from us here to save their struggling business from total marketing disaster.

[winrid]

At the least they should care more about UX. I have no idea how to restore the sidebar on chatgpt on desktop lol

[Legend2440]

Click the 'open sidebar' icon in the top left corner of the screen.

[winrid]

There isn't one, unless they fixed it today. Just a down arrow to change the model.

[Legend2440]

Try clearing your cache, the button has always been there for me.

[avs733]

Hype based marketing can be effective but it is high risk and unstable.

A marketing team isn’t a generality that makes a company known, it often focuses on communicating what products different types of customers need from your lineup.

If I sell three medications:

Steve

56285

Priximetrin

And only tell you they are all pain killers but for different types and levels of pain I’m going to leave revenue on the floor. That is no matter how valuable my business is or how well it’s known.

[optimalsolver]

>this $300Bn company

Watch this space.

[ninetyninenine]

I bet you can get one of their models to fix that disaster.

[ryanhecht]

But what would we call that model?

[ninetyninenine]

Let’s call it “O5 Pro Max Elite”—because if nonsense naming works for smartphones, why not AI models?

[ryandrake]

O5 Pro Max Elite Enterprise Edition with Ultra

[TeMPOraL]

Maybe they could start selling "season passes" next to make their offering even more clear!

[aleph_minus_one]

> But what would we call that model?

Ask one of their models for advice. :-)

[ryanhecht]

Reminds me of a joke in the musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" (written in 1961):

PETERSON Oh say, Tackaberry, did you get my memo?

TACKABERRY What memo?

PETERSON My memo about memos. We're sending out too many memos and it's got to stop!

TACKABERRY All right. I'll send out a memo.

[rowanG077]

If marketing terms from intel, AMD, Dell and other tech companies have taught me anything, it's that they need LESS of people in marketing.

[TeMPOraL]

But think of all the other marketers whose job is to produce blogspam explaining confusing product names!

[ryanhecht]

Ugh, and some of the rows of that table are "sets of models" while some are singular models...there's the "Flagship models" section at the top only for "GPT models" to be heralded as "Our fast, versatile, high intelligence flagship models" in the NEXT section...

...I like "DALL·E" and "Whisper" as names a lot, though, FWIW :p

[koakuma-chan]

Name is just a label. It's not supposed to mean anything.

[ninetyninenine]

Think how awesome the world would be if labels ALSO had meanings.

[koakuma-chan]

As someone else said in another thread, if you could derive the definition from a word, the word would be as long as the definition, which would defeat the purpose.

[ninetyninenine]

Im not saying words. Im saying labels.

You use words as labels so that we use our pre existing knowledge of the word to derive meaning from the label.

[TeMPOraL]

There is no such thing. "Meaning" isn't a property of a label, it arises from how that label is used with other labels in communication.

It's actually the reason LLMs work in the first place.

[optimalsolver]

You're gonna need to ground those labels in something physical at some point.

No one's going to let an LLM near anything important until then.

[TeMPOraL]

You only need it for bootstrapping. Fortunately, we've already done that when we invented first languages. LLMs are just bootstrapping off us.

[golol]

I don't find OpenAIs naming conventions confusing, except that the o for omni and the o for reasoning have nothing to do with eachother. That's a crime.

[fourseventy]

It's almost as bad as the Xbox naming scheme.

[Someone1234]

I don't know if anything is as bad as a games console named "Series."

[observationist]

They should be calling it ChatGPT and ChatGPT-mini, with other models hidden behind some sort of advanced mode power user menu. They can roll out major and minor updates by number. The whole point of differentiating between models is to get users to self limit the compute they consume - rate limits make people avoid using the more powerful models, and if they have a bad experience using the less capable models, or if they're frustrated by hopping between versions without some sort of nuanced technical understanding, it's just a bad experience overall.

OpenAI is so scattered they haven't even bothered using their own state of the art AI to come up with a coherent naming convention? C'mon, get your shit together.

[TeMPOraL]

"ChatGPT" (chatgpt-4o) is now its own model, distinct from gpt-4o.

As for self-limiting usage by non-power users, they're already doing that: ChatGPT app automatically picks a model depending on what capabilities you invoke. While they provide a limited ability to see and switch the model in use, they're clearly expecting regular users not to care, and design their app around that.

[observationist]

None of that matters to normal users, and you could satisfy power users with serial numbers or even unique ideograms. Naming isn't that hard, and their models are surprisingly adept at it. A consistent naming scheme improves customer experience by preventing confusion - when a new model comes out, I field questions for days from friends and family - "what does this mean? which model should i use? Aww, I have to download another update?" and so on. None of the stated reasons for not having a coherent naming convention for their models are valid. I'd be upset as a stakeholder, they're burning credibility and marketing power for no good reason.

modelname(variant).majorVersion.minorVersion ChatGPT(o).3.0 ChatGPT-mini(o).3.0 GPT.2.123 GPT.3.9

And so on. Once it's coherent, people pick it up, and naturally call the model by "modelname majorversion" , and there's no confusion or hesitance about which is which. See, it took me 2 minutes.

Even better: Have an OAI slack discussion company-wide, then have managers summarize their team's discussions into a prompt demonstrating what features they want out of it, then run all the prompts together and tell the AI to put together 3 different naming schemes based on all the features the employees want. Roll out a poll and have employees vote which of the 3 gets used going forward. Or just tap into that founder mode and pick one like a boss.

Don't get me wrong, I love using AI - we are smack dab in the middle of a revolution and normal people aren't quite catching on yet, so it's exhilarating and empowering to be able to use this stuff, like being one of the early users of the internet. We can see what's coming, and if you lived through the internet growing up, you know there's going to be massive, unexpected synergies and developments of systems and phenomena we don't yet have the words for.

OpenAI can do better, and they should.

[TeMPOraL]

I agree with your observations, and that they both could and should do better. However, they have the privilege of being the AI company, the most hyped-up brand in the most hyped-up segment of economy - at this point, the impact of their naming strategy is approximately nil. Sure, they're confusing their users a bit, but their users are very highly motivated.

It's like with videogames - most of them commit all kinds of UI/UX sins, and I often wish they didn't, but excepting extreme cases, the players are too motivated to care or notice.

[golol]

This mentality is why teenagers can't use a file system. Why do tech people love to hide as much state as possible. Does it really help anyone?

[layer8]

Inscrutable naming is a proven strategy for muddying the waters.

[jtwaleson]

Salesforce would like a word...

[SAI_Peregrinus]

The USB-IF as well. Retroactively changing the name of a previous standard was particularly ridiculous. It's always been USB 3.1 Gen 1 like we've always been at war with Eastasia.