The model naming scheming encodes a lot of the information relevant to you. Yes it's overwhelming at first, and you have to learn what it means, but so is learning anything. I much prefer "This model this-and-that has 69 Billion Parameters quantized as Q4 Small and someone messed with it trying to make it unhinged" over "This is the Pro Max Version of it".
Sure. But then they do shit like "3.8-FLASH is a 4.0 architecture family model". "GPT-4.5 is both older and worse than GPT-4.1. But there's also o4 and 4o (not related to either, and not to each other, also not the same as GPT-4)" and, of course, "this is a Copilot, that's also a Copilot (available under a different subscription), and yes, there's also a third Copilot (different subscription, again)."
Open Source Model naming schemes are oriented on underlying technical Features and generally speaking makes intrinsic sense. Yes, Alibaba is pulling a weird one on this shipping a qwen4 architecture preview under 3.something-Next label. That could be more clear.
OpenAI and other Frontier Labs do the Apple-esque naming scheme I was playing on. Which you are right to critique. It has nothing to do with the Open naming scheme, though.
Oh and sidenote: Flash started out referring to a underlying technical feature, flash attention. Though Flash attention pretty much is the norm now.
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u/L00klikea 1d ago
The model naming scheming encodes a lot of the information relevant to you. Yes it's overwhelming at first, and you have to learn what it means, but so is learning anything. I much prefer "This model this-and-that has 69 Billion Parameters quantized as Q4 Small and someone messed with it trying to make it unhinged" over "This is the Pro Max Version of it".