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What a model mess! OpenAI now has three price points: GPT 5.1, GPT 5.2 and now GPT 5.4. There version numbers jump across different model lines with codex at 5
by __jl__ 7mo ago
What a model mess!
OpenAI now has three price points: GPT 5.1, GPT 5.2 and now GPT 5.4. There version numbers jump across different model lines with codex at 5.3, what they now call instant also at 5.3.
Anthropic are really the only ones who managed to get this under control: Three models, priced at three different levels. New models are immediately available everywhere.
Google essentially only has Preview models! The last GA is 2.5. As a developer, I can either use an outdated model or have zero insurances that the model doesn't get discontinued within weeks.
- arthurcolle 7mo agoThere is a lot of opportunity here for the AI infrastructure layer on top of tier-1 model providers
- motoxpro 7mo agoThis is what clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP solve (vertex AI, etc). They are already an abstraction on top of the model makers with distribution built in. I also don't believe there is any value in trying to aggregate consumers or businesses just to clean up model makers names/release schedule. Consumers just use the default, and businesses need clarity on the underlying change (e.g. why is it acting different? Oh google released 3.6)
- arthurcolle 7mo agoDo the end users really care about the models at all, or about the effects that the models can cause?
- strongpigeon 7mo ago> Google essentially only has Preview models! The last GA is 2.5. As a developer, I can either use an outdated model or have zero insurances that the model doesn't get discontinued within weeks. What's funny is that there is this common meme at Google: you can either use the old, unmaintained tool that's used everywhere, or the new beta tools that doesn't quite do what you want. Not quite the same, but it did remind me of it.
- jakub_g 7mo ago"Everything is beta or deprecated."
- fhrow4484 7mo agohttps://static0.anpoimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/08/2011-03-16_two_roads.png https://static0.anpoimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/...
- yieldcrv 7mo agoPreview Road (only choice, and last preview was deprecated without warning)
- goodmythical 7mo agowhere's my nightly road? Who knows, I might arrive before I depart.
- hdjrudni 7mo agoIf the last preview was 'deprecated', it's still usable. So you have two choices. Peeve of mine when people say 'deprecated' but really they mean 'discontinued' or 'deleted'. Things don't instantly disappear when they're deprecated.
- yieldcrv 7mo agoTake it up with the organizations that use deprecated and break things immediately
- CactusBlue 7mo agoReminds of Unity features
- tymscar 7mo agoI still remember the massive shift to SDRP and HDRP. Honestly, now in retrospect, almost a decade later, I think it was clearly done wrong. It was a mess, and switching over was a multi-week procedure for anything more than a hello world program, and what you got in return wasn’t something that looked better, just something that had the potential to. Similar story with the whole networking stack. I haven’t used Unity in years now after it being my main work environment for years, but the sour taste it left in my mouth by moving everything that worked in the engine into plugins that barely worked will forever remain there. Im sure its partly skill issue
- delaminator 7mo agotwo great problems in computing naming things cache invalidation off by one errors
- rurban 7mo agoBiggest problem right now in computing: Out of tokens until end of month
- CamperBob2 7mo agoMore like, "Out of DRAM until end of world"
- embedding-shape 7mo ago> OpenAI now has three price points: GPT 5.1, GPT 5.2 and now GPT 5.4. I guess that's true, but geared towards API users. Personally, since "Pro Mode" became available, I've been on the plan that enables that, and it's one price point and I get access to everything, including enough usage for codex that someone who spends a lot of time programming, never manage to hit any usage limits although I've gotten close once to the new (temporary) Spark limits.
- 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago> or have zero insurances that the model doesn't get discontinued within weeks Why are you using the same model after a month? Every month a better model comes out. They are all accessible via the same API. You can pay per-token. This is the first time in, like, all of technology history, that a useful paid service is so interoperable between providers that switching is as easy as changing a URL.
- phainopepla2 7mo agoIf you're trying to use LLMs in an enterprise context, you would understand. Switching models sometimes requires tweaking prompts. That can be a complete mess, when there are dozens or hundreds of prompts you have to test.
- bethekidyouwant 7mo agoThis sounds made up. Much like “prompt engineering” Let’s hear an actual example
- mcint 7mo agoEnterprises moving slow, or preferring to remain on old technology that they already know how to work...is received wisdom in hn-adjacent computing, a truism known and reported for more than 3 decades (5 decades since the Mythical Man-Month). Sounds like someone who's responsible, on the hook, for a bunch of processes, repeatable processes (as much as LLM driven processes will be), operating at scale. Just in the open, tools like open-webui bolts on evals so you can compare: how different models, including new ones, perform on the tasks that you in particular care about. Indeed LLM model providers mainly don't release models that do worse on benchmarks—running evals is the same kind of testing, but outside the corporate boundary, pre-release feedback loop, and public evaluation. https://chatgpt.com/share/69aa1972-ae84-800a-9cb1-de5d5fd7a46a https://chatgpt.com/share/69aa1972-ae84-800a-9cb1-de5d5fd7a4...
- gwd 7mo agoOK, so a while back I set up a workflow to do language tagging. There were 6-8 stages in the pipeline where it would go out to an LLM and come back. Each one has its own prompt that has to be tweaked to get it to give decent results. I was only doing it for a smallish batch (150 short conversations) and only for private use; but I definitely wouldn't switch models without doing another informal round of quality assessment and prompt tweaking. If this were something I was using in production there would be a whole different level of testing and quality required before switching to a different model.
- Aurornis 7mo ago> 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.
- Melatonic 7mo agoAgreed - and its a huge step up from their previous naming schemes. That stuff was confusing as hell
- __jl__ 7mo agoI 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.
- IgorPartola 7mo agoThe 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 6mo ago> 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.
- raincole 7mo agoThey aggressively retire models, so GPT 5.1 and 5.2 are probably going to go soon.
- hobofan 7mo agoIn the Azure Foundry, they list GPT 5.2 retirement as "No earlier than 2027-05-12" (it might leave OpenAIs normal API earlier than that). I'm pretty certain that Gemini 3, which isn't even in GA yet will be retired earlier than that.
- CobrastanJorji 7mo ago> Google essentially only has Preview models. It's really nice to see Google get back to its roots by launching things only to "beta" and then leaving them there for years. Gmail was "beta" for at least five years, I think.
- FINDarkside 7mo agoAlso, GCP Cloud Run domain mapping, pretty fundamental feature for cloud product, has been in "preview" for over 5 years now.
- jsmith99 7mo agoIt's still unavailable in many regions.
- m3kw9 7mo agothats how they had it for years, is a mess, but controlled
- biophysboy 7mo agoWow, is that what preview means? I see those model options in github copilot (all my org allows right now) - I was under the impression that preview means a free trial or a limited # of queries. Kind of a misleading name..
- snug 7mo agoPretty common to call something that isn't ready a preview
- jbonatakis 7mo agoGoogle is already sending notices that the 2.5 models will be deprecated soon while all the 3.x models are in preview. It really is wild and peak Google.
- boringg 7mo agoLike building on quicksand for dependencies. I guess though the argument is that the foundation gets stronger over time
- bethekidyouwant 7mo agoWhat dependancy could possibly be tied to a non deterministic ai model? Just include the latest one at your price point.
- jbonatakis 7mo agoWell it’s not even performance (define that however you will), but behavior is definitely different model to model. So while whatever new model is released might get billed as an improvement, changing models can actually meaningfully impact the behavior of any app built on top of it.
- deaux 7mo agoThere's a whole universe of tasks that aren't "fix a Github issue" or even related to coding in the slightest. A large number of those tasks doesn't necessarily get better with model updates. In many cases, the performance is similar but with different behavior so you have to rewrite prompts to get the same. In some cases the performance is just worse. Model updates usually only really guarantee to be better at coding, and maybe image understanding.
- npn 7mo agothe problem the price point is increasing sharply every time. gemini 2 flash lite was $0.3 per 1Mtok output, gemini 2.5 flash lite is $0.4 per 1Mtok output, guess the pricing for gemini 3 flash lite now. yes you guess it right, it is $1.5 per 1Mtok output. you can easily guest that because google did the same thing before: gemini 2 flash was $0.4, then 2.5 flash it jumps to $2.5. and that is only the base price, in reality newer models are al thinking models, so it costs even more tokens for the sample task. at some point it is stopped being viable to use gemini api for anything. and they don't even keep the old models for long.
- beklein 7mo agoNot sure why you think Anthropic has not the same problems? Their version numbers across different model lines jump around too... for Opus we have 4.6, 4.5, 4.1 then we have Sonnet at 4.6, 4.5, and 4.1? No version 4.1 here, and there is Haiku, no 4.6, but 4.5 and no 4.1, no 4 but then we only have old 3.5... Also their pricing based on 5m/1h cache hits, cash read hits, additional charges for US inference (but only for Opus 4.6 I guess) and optional features such as more context and faster speed for some random multiplier is also complex and actually quiet similar to OpenAI's pricing scheme. To me it looks like everybody has similar problems and solutions for the same kinds of problems and they just try their best to offer different products and services to their customers.
- svachalek 7mo agoIt's much more consistent. Only 3 lines, numbered 4.6, 4.6, and 4.5, and it's clear they're tiers and not alternate product lines. It wasn't until recently that GPT seems to have any kind of naming convention at all and it's not intuitive if every version number is a whole different class of tool. The pricing is more complex but also easy, Opus > Sonnet > Haiku no matter how you tweak those variables.
- selcuka 7mo agoWith Anthropic you always have 3 models to choose from: Opus-latest, Sonnet-latest, and Haiku-latest, from the best/slowest to the worst/fastest. The version numbers are mostly irrelevant as afaik price per token doesn't change between versions.
- maxo99 7mo agoThree random names isn't ideal. I'm often need to double check which is which. This is why we use numbers
- echoangle 7mo agoHow are the names random? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku They dropped the magnum from opus but you could still easily deduce the order of the models just from their names if you know the words.
- awad 7mo agoIncredibly curious how Google's approach to support, naming, versioning etc will mesh with the iOS integration.
- abustamam 7mo agoI mean, Google notoriously discontinues even non-beta software, so if your concern is that there's insurance that the model doesn't get discontinued, then you may as well just use whatever you want since GA could also get discontinued.
- jijji 7mo agoI tried to use Google's Gemini CLI from the command line on linux and I think it let me type in two sentences and then it told me that I was out of credits... and then I started reading comments that it would overwrite files destructively [0] or worse just try to rewrite an entire existing codebase [1]. it just doesn't sound ready for prime time. I think they wanted to push something out to compete with Claude code but it's just really really bad. [0] https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/17583 https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/17583 [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1l8vil5/gemini_keeps_rewriting_my_entire_code_instead_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1l8vil5/gemini_keeps_...
- fnordpiglet 7mo ago5.4 is the one fine tuned for autonomous mass murder, automated surveillance state, and money grabs at any cost. It’s really hard to lump that into the others as it’s a fairly unique and specialized feature set. You can’t really call it that tho so they have to use the numbers. I’m pretty glad I’m out of the OpenAI ecosystem in all seriousness. It is genuinely a mess. This marketing page is also just literally all over the place and could probably be about 20% of its size.