Comment by nickysielicki
6 days 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.
The 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, ...
Surely there's a less stupid way than naming two very different models o4 and 4o.
What’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
Even 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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. ```
Just use o4-mini for everything
Why not o3?
2 replies →
If 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.
At 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.
Sam Altman has said the same thing on Twitter a few times. 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?
I’d prefer for them to just fix it asap instead and then keep the existing endpoints around for a year as aliases.
1 reply →
How about they ask ChatGPT for help !
I know they have a deep relationship with Microsoft, but perhaps they shouldn’t have used Microsoft’s product naming department.
Zune .NET O3... shudders
2 replies →
Came 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..
I’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.