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> While OpenAI o1 remains our broader general knowledge reasoning model, OpenAI o3-mini provides a specialized alternative for technical domains requiring preci
by ryanhecht 2y ago
> 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!
- kingnothing 2y agoThey 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 https://platform.openai.com/docs/models
- rowanG077 2y agoIf 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 2y agoBut think of all the other marketers whose job is to produce blogspam explaining confusing product names!
- ninetyninenine 2y agoI bet you can get one of their models to fix that disaster.
- ryanhecht 2y agoBut what would we call that model?
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago> But what would we call that model? Ask one of their models for advice. :-)
- ryanhecht 2y agoReminds 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.
- ninetyninenine 2y agoLet’s call it “O5 Pro Max Elite”—because if nonsense naming works for smartphones, why not AI models?
- n2d4 2y ago> 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 2y ago> 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 2y agoThey 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ryanhecht 2y agoUgh, 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
- golly_ned 2y agoYes, 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 2y agoAt the least they should care more about UX. I have no idea how to restore the sidebar on chatgpt on desktop lol
- Legend2440 2y agoClick the 'open sidebar' icon in the top left corner of the screen.
- winrid 2y agoThere isn't one, unless they fixed it today. Just a down arrow to change the model.
- Legend2440 2y agoTry clearing your cache, the button has always been there for me.
- winrid 2y agojust reproduced this, not sure what button it is, I think page up? but it removes the sidebar, messes up the layout, and no obv way to fix.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- meiraleal 2y ago[dead]
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- TeMPOraL 2y ago> 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 2y agoWhat if you use ASCII 234? Ω (edit: works!)
- TeMPOraL 2y agoThanks! 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.
- koakuma-chan 2y agoName is just a label. It's not supposed to mean anything.
- ninetyninenine 2y agoThink how awesome the world would be if labels ALSO had meanings.
- koakuma-chan 2y agoAs 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 2y agoIm 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 2y agoThere 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 2y agoYou'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 2y agoYou only need it for bootstrapping. Fortunately, we've already done that when we invented first languages. LLMs are just bootstrapping off us.
- layer8 2y agoInscrutable naming is a proven strategy for muddying the waters.
- jtwaleson 2y agoSalesforce would like a word...
- SAI_Peregrinus 2y agoThe 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.
- unsupp0rted 2y agoThis 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 2y agoNot 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 2y agoIf 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.
- KeplerBoy 2y agoThat's first mover advantage.
- bobxmax 2y agoI think that has more to do with the multiple year head start and multiple tens of billions of dollars in funding advantage.
- joshstrange 2y agoAnd you think that is due to their model naming?
- cj 2y agoChatGPT 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)
- zamadatix 2y agoThe -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 2y ago> 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.
- observationist 2y agoThey 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 2y ago"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 2y agoNone 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.
- fourseventy 2y agoIt's almost as bad as the Xbox naming scheme.
- Someone1234 2y agoI don't know if anything is as bad as a games console named "Series."
- golol 2y agoI 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.