Comment by petilon
4 days ago
The naming system is so confusing. Is Opus better than Sonnet? Where does Haiku fit in? How can you tell from the name? I can't keep track of all these names or make guesses from the names. Suggestion for a better naming system: use the words "Pro", "Plus", etc.: Claude 5 Pro, Claude 5 Standard, Claude 5 Fast, Claude 5 Mini.
Fable is better than Opus which is better than Sonnet which is better than Haiku. They’re basically just sizes.
Though it gets even more confusing because they also have effort levels so it’s not really possible to call one fast and one slow since Fable on Medium will be faster than Opus on Max.
I agree it’s confusing, and now OpenAI is following Anthropic’s lead with their new naming (Sol, Terra, Luna).
It's really not all that confusing. It takes 5 minutes to understand. Optimizing for absolutely no effort needed is silly. It's a thing, a topic, a skill, a domain. You have to get a little bit familiar with the terms in order to use it. Everything works like that. It's not that hard. The learning curve is very graceful. You can literally just start by asking any chatbot what the names mean. It's that easy.
A similar complaint was valid years ago when OpenAI had GPT-4o, o1, o3 (but no o2), o4-mini-high, GPT-4, and GPT-4.1 and GPT-3.5 etc.
I am familiar with the terms, but I also can see how it can be confusing for a lot of people.
Arguably the complaint was more valid for those older GPT models you mentioned.
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But according to their benchmarks Opus 5 outscores Fable 5 on basically everything. So which one is “better”?
Maybe more accurately I should have said “larger”. Fable has the most parameters, Haiku has the fewest.
Also fwiw I’ve never found LLM benchmarks to match reality based on my own usage, not for the large frontier models or smaller open weight models so who knows if Opus is actually better than Fable (I doubt it).
I think the problem is that Fable 5 is probably a bit outdated right now.
Fable 5.1 or whatever they go with will be the stronger version vs Opus 5.
From about 2 hours of Opus 5 use , I would say it is quite impressive.
An opus is longer than a sonnet, which is longer than a haiku. Hence Opus > Sonnet > Haiku.
> Suggestion for a better naming system: use the words "Pro", "Plus", etc.: Claude 5 Pro, Claude 5 Standard, Claude 5 Fast, Claude 5 Mini.
This is not possible: Standard (Free) / Pro / Max are plan names. Fast is a mode.
How long is a fable though?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop's_Fables#Select_fables
Enjoy
You're confused by this? Fable > Opus > Sonnet > Haiku. Sort by price. Most expensive = better. Are you an alien? lol
Opus is better than Sonnet -- an Opus is longer than a Sonnet
> an Opus is longer than a Sonnet
And people know this? I didn't. I am not into music or poetry so these are not terms I am familiar with.
I guess you are one of today's lucky 10,000 [0]
[0] https://xkcd.com/1053/
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An opus is just short for "magnum opus", and it's a different type of label than a sonnet. A sonnet is a very particular kind of poem, while "opus" basically just means an important work. It can be short or long, and has no format requirements like sonnet (or haiku does).
And fables are not particularly long actually.
To clarify: opus is not the same thing as έπος (épos), which is rendered as epic in English, both as adjective and noun. An έπος is indeed a type of long written work, but opus (work) is unrelated etymologically, they come from different Proto-Indo-European roots.