[Aurornis]

> What a model mess! OpenAI now has three price points: GPT 5.1, GPT 5.2 and now GPT 5.4.

I don't know, this feels unnecessarily nitpicky to me

It isn't hard to understand that 5.4 > 5.2 > 5.1. It's not hard to understand that the dash-variants have unique properties that you want to look up before selecting.

Especially for a target audience of software engineers skipping a version number is a common occurrence and never questioned.

[IgorPartola]

The issue isn’t 5.4 > 5.2 etc. It is that there is a second dimension which is the model size and a third dimension which is what it is tuned for. And when you are releasing so quickly that flagship your instant mini model is on one numerical version but your flagship tool calling mini model is on another it is confusing trying to figure out which actual model you want for your use case.

It’s not impossible to figure out but it is a symptom of them releasing as quickly as possible to try to dominate the news and mindshare.

[Aurornis]

> The issue isn’t 5.4 > 5.2 etc. It is that there is a second dimension which is the model size and a third dimension which is what it is tuned for.

All 3 models are tuned for general purpose work.

Model size isn’t how you pick which model to use. You pick based on performance in evals compared to price.

It’s not hard to imagine that the more expensive models are probably larger or having higher compute requirements.

[Melatonic]

Agreed - and its a huge step up from their previous naming schemes. That stuff was confusing as hell

[__jl__]

I see your point. I do find Anthropic's approach more clean though particularly when you add in mini and nano. That makes 5 models priced differently. Some share the same core name, others don't: gpt 5 nano, gpt 5 mini, gpt 5.1, gpt 5.2, gpt 5.4. And we are not even talking about thinking budget.

But generally: These are not consumer facing products and I agree that someone who uses the API should be able to figure out the price point of different models.

[Reebz]

I don’t agree that it’s a nitpick - it’s a fundamental communication tool to users that describes capabilities and costs. Versioning is not the problem, but it amplifies the mess.

To be more direct on the point: Anthropic has nailed that Opus > Sonnet > Haiku.

[com2kid]

> To be more direct on the point: Anthropic has nailed that Opus > Sonnet > Haiku.

Holy cow I never realized and I had to keep checking which model was which, I never had managed to remember which model was which size before because I never realized there was a theme with the names!

[Aurornis]

> To be more direct on the point: Anthropic has nailed that Opus > Sonnet > Haiku.

How is this more clear than 5.4 > 5.2 > 5.1?

OpenAI used familiar numeric versioning instead of clever word names. Normally this choice would appeal to software devs, not gather criticism.

[bibimsz]

I assume 5.4 is just the latest version. So if I'm on 5.1, I need to plan to upgrade to the latest version. I may assume the pricing is roughly the same, as well as the speed, and the purpose.

If I'm on Haiku, I don't assume I need to upgrade to Opus soon. I use Haiku for fast low reasoning, and Opus for slower more thoughtful answers.

And if I'm on Sonnet 4.5 and I see Sonnet 4.6 is coming out, I can reasonably assume it's more of a drop in upgrade, rather than a different beast.

[Reebz]

Prod model suite: GPT-5.4, GPT-5.4Thinking, GPT-5.4Pro, GPT-5.3-Codex, GPT-5.3-Instant, GPT-5.2, GPT-5mini, GPT5-nano, GPT-4.1mini GPT-4o(Omni), o4-mini, o4-mini-high.

Devoid of logic and structure.

They can't even decide where to place hyphens: is it GPT-5.4 Pro or GPT-5.3-Codex?