Comment by Majromax
8 hours ago
> Luna < Terra < Sol < Astra, fine. But does Terra 6.1 beat Sol 6? Does Fable 5.1 beat Opus 5.5? If I build something around this Terra 6.1 release, then when Luna 6.2 is released in a month, should I swap?
I understand how it can be confusing, but I don't think that this is exactly a problem.
Luna through Astra offer qualitative descriptions of the model's size. Presumably OpenAI trains its biggest model (Astra-ish, maybe even larger) first, then distills it to smaller sizes.
Verison numbers reflect something about the architecture or training dataset. Again, they keep these details close to their chest, but we should expect that weight-for-weight higher versions should beat lower versions.
This offers us two axes of 'better', but these axes are also not directly comparable. An earlier but bigger model may or may not beat a newer but smaller model. This is where 'spiky' intelligence comes in.
This is also where calls to 'run your own evaluation' really do start to matter. If you care enough about this performance[1], then you also have specific problems that you care about. No generic benchmark can fully answer that question, hence the need for a specific evaluation.
[1] — And you don't have to! A casual user is probably served reasonably well by anything put out in the past six months. I think Microsoft is still serving GPT-4o under some Copilot branding.
I think it is a problem, for OpenAI. If their answer to "which of your models are better" is to throw their hands in the air and say "fuck if we know, go figure it out yourself" then that's going to go poorly as soon as they try to actually sell to some of the market they're predicting they can sell to.
Whether they train the biggest model first or not is not relevant; what matters is what they release. Right now we've got 6.1 Sol and 6.0 Astra. Over at Anthropic they've got Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1. The existence of a hypothetical Fable 5.5 that I'm not allowed to use doesn't help me.