[delayed]

they probably went to chatGPT and asked for good names

I don't think it's good scheme to follow but google is just following the trend of anthropic and OpenAI set up. I don't think anyone can understand Anthropic's Model naming scale with Haiku, opus, fable and Mythos is. Similar with tje OpenAI tera and other models.

I find theirs to be a lot more excusable, given it's obvious that the Sun is bigger than the Earth, which is bigger than the Moon. Anthropic less-so, but if you know the meaning of each, you can infer it somewhat well.

Google's is just random.

> but google is just following the trend of anthropic and OpenAI set up.

They botched it.

A haiku is a short poem. A sonnet is a longer work. An opus is a great work. Mythos is a connected body of works.

As with Open AI, Luna --> Terra --> Sol --> Astra from smallest to largest. Very straightforward.

With Google it's totally incoherent. Hydrogen --> Argon --> Carbon!?

Hydrogen is small, but it's the most abundant element in the universe by far. Argon is >3x larger than carbon by molecular mass, though carbon is more abundant. It's impossible to determine what's supposed to be smaller and what's supposed to be larger.

Yea, impossible to know whether it's supposed to go by atomic mass, frequency or some other metric. Plus most people off the top of their heads don't really have these stats memorized. With OpenAI and Anthropic it's way more straightforward.

Yeah. Atomic mass: Makes no sense, argon is larger than carbon. Frequency: Makes no sense, argon is least frequent of the three and hydrogen is everywhere, so carbon would be in-between rather than the flagship.

Letters of the alphabet: Also makes no sense. There was a theory that Argon = A, that there was an unreleased B model (Bismuth or Barium or something), Carbon = C, etc. (Similar to Intel's MMORPG-inspired Alchemist --> Battlemage --> Celestial...) Hydrogen broke this notion.

It's just completely incoherent.

Now written out like this, I can see a D = Deuterium, which is mass 2 or heavy hydrogen, but somewhere along along the line it was lost in translation.

I’m not sure if the average person on the street would know the terms Luna, Terra, Sol, and especially Astra.

Also, the biggest being Astra is a bit confusing. Sol is also a star.

Furthermore, unless you know they’re supposed to be ordered by size you can’t know which is best.

> I’m not sure if the average person on the street would know the terms Luna, Terra, Sol, and especially Astra.

I don't think these are as difficult as you're making them sound? I think the majority of people who will care what model they're using will know "lunar", "terrestrial", "solar", "astronomy" etc?

Corsa, Astra, Vectra and Omega would be better names.

I never made these connections until now. This will really help me remember which is which, I honestly had just given up.

when you put it this way, it sounds like they are operating on an XY axis (at least) vs a continuum. Argon big, complicated, slow AND expensive; Carbon abundant, widely available, costly; Hydrogen, abundant, volatile, cheap. can't imagine how insane Nitrogen must be

Sometimes I wonder if naming things is hard or what.

Google genuinely have made a huge mess with their AI product stack. They have Antigravity, Antigravity IDE, Gemini app, AI Studio, etc. They have too many similarly named and confusing products. Google should seriously fire their branding team and bring some new talent to consolidate and restructure things logically.

Maybe the AI is trying to tell us its real name !

Ar - C - H - ?

If the next two are oxygen and nitrogen, which are plausible, that would be somewhat sinister.

[delayed]

What's a fable? Why is it bigger than an Opus?

I guess it's poetic but I don't see how haiku < sonnet < opus < fable < mythos is unclear. If you've never been exposed to literature maybe?

You day that very matter of factly as if it doesn't include "opus < fable"

I think people on HN argue way too much about this. It's not like they're named iPhone 18 Pro XL Max. It's meant to evoke a feeling of wonder or awe, not really that hard of a logical leap to make, and it's only one minor quibble. Jeesh.

Mythos (Greek) = Fable (Latin)

Fable is essentially Mythos but with guard rails added.

Anthropic's naming does not make sense, but at least they are consistent.

What about it makes no sense? I find it to make the most sense, given it's about text generation and their models are named from shortest text to longest.

I think the others are mostly pretty clear. A haiku is a very short poem; a sonnet is a longer poem; an opus is an artistic masterwork ("Magnum opus"), so not necessarily longer but certainly grander. Mythos is slightly more tenuous but still goes in the direction of "cultural awe", something that the highest forms of writing aim for. Fable isn't a perfect name TBH, it sounds much less grand than "mythos" to my ears despite being roughly the same product AFAICT, and with a dangerous hint of "I might make things up".

I think OpenAI's names are clearest. In most people's understanding, moon < Earth < sun < stars.

More importantly, Anthropic has been consistent with their naming convention for years (two, yes, but plural years) now. OpenAI and Google’s habit of changing naming conventions semi-regularly makes their products harder to grok.

Android version names were random desserts for the longest time. People are expecting too much from Google here

They weren't random. They were alphabetical. The first letter of the name always shifted to the next letter in the alphabet.

• Cupcake (Android 1.5)

• Donut (Android 1.6)

• Eclair (Android 2.0–2.1)

• Froyo (Android 2.2)

• Gingerbread (Android 2.3)

• Honeycomb (Android 3.0–3.2)

• Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0)

• Jelly Bean (Android 4.1–4.3)

• KitKat (Android 4.4)

• Lollipop (Android 5.0–5.1)

• Marshmallow (Android 6.0)

• Nougat (Android 7.0–7.1)

• Oreo (Android 8.0–8.1)

• Pie (Android 9)

This isn't the same situation. Android versions always had 2 parts: the number and the name. They were always easy to follow.

Using constantly changing names for tiers is a bad idea. Unless the tiers are pre-existing (bronze, silver, gold).

They were alphabetically ordered random desserts. It wasn't too bad.

> Fable isn't a perfect name TBH

Fables are short.

They should have used "saga" / "epic" / "cycle" / "series" / "universe".

I realize that you're making a point about ordering here but realistically none of these except maybe Saga work as Anthropic product names.

I think of it as earth being where I am, not in relation to the size of the items, so to me it’s weird that Luna is far away, then Terra is close, then Sol is further. So even those names aren’t clear to everyone. Actually I didn’t realize the ordering was size-based until you said it. And Astra isn’t really a size, is it?

This is so dorky, but I have a comparison with frisbees. In Disc golf each brand does its own naming scheme related to the speed / stability of discs. One company (Prodigy) produced a _roughly_ ordered approach and people very regularly commented on how confusing it was. By comparison, other brands (which got no critiques) have literally arbitrary names matching only a theme (e.g. electricity, animals, ...mental disorders/phenomena). It took me a very long time to come to grips with it. I ultimately think with branding... it only matters that people who use the system can identify things as distinct. I think the subset of minds that wants a strictly logical relationship to ordering is fleetingly small. To most people its additionally not even relevant.

My only real complaint with Google is they regularly change names for seemingly no reason. I'm still out here saying "Gemini" when I type "agy" and I don't bother saying "Anti gravity" because I assume that name won't exist in a year or two.

OMG, it rolled out on my paid Google Workspace account already too! What a change from ~"wait 8 weeks or more from google.com rollout to <yourdomain> rollout"

Thanks any Googlers who had a hand in this

I'm going to assume they are saving on inference by rolling it out faster.

Why do you think rolling out faster -> more inference savings?

Smaller model, likely.

If one of the dimensions it improves upon is inference cost per unit of work, then switching over to it would save money, and the sooner you do that, the more you save.

If it's more efficient than 3.8 that it replaces.

Look at how many AI adjacent products Google talks about in this press release along with its model names. Anthropic and OpenAI are guilty of it as well, so many models and ways of working with them right now, letting the users figure out the nuances of each.

Earlier today I found myself asking ChatGPT to research and explain exactly what Anthropic Playground is for and how specifically it may differ for my tasks from Anthropic Workspace, Chat, Code, and API credits. I chose ChatGPT Sol 6.1 high for this task going on gut feel, hoping it was the best model to handle that job without wasting my precious Claude tokens.

I think there need to build these adjacent things to create lock in. I can switch between Claude, GPT and pretty much and model on OpenRouter in little time, especially for dev work. With all of these being weeks apart in progress on the models and open-weight models seemingly getting closer and closer there is almost no moat. Without a moat they cannot charge high prices - it's a commodity. Having lots of my data in their system and having other exclusinve features like Claude Design or Whiteboard and what not, they create something that I cannot keep if I switch to a different vendor for a cheaper model.

It's the equivalent of Gemini Flash, judging by the API price. I just tried it in the Gemini app, it's much better than the previous version.

Agreed on the naming issue and while it was novel at first it will inevitably get worse as more models get release, until decide to abandon it all together. It’s like they are setting themselves up for failure on that front lol

Naming an AI model Argon will never not be hilarious to me.

It doesn't do anything! It's inert!

I'm waiting for Gemini 5 Uranium.

Which will be launched after GPT 7 Uranus.

[delayed]

They just trying to register the model names into our mind. Now a days we remember Fable, Opus, Sonnet. I think Google trying to do the same.

Problem is we have no idea here what it should mean.

Carbon is the next version of Argon. But Hydrogen is supposed to coexist with Carbon. Also no idea where the scheme is coming from, what elements should we expect.

Also I intuitively get that a sonnet is "shorter" than an opus (although Fable is less clear) - I have no idea what i'm even supposed to be comparing with google elements... Atomic number? I know hydrogen is the lowest and i guess argon is bigger than carbon but am I expected to know that? Or is it by weight? Argon's a gas so it's lighter than Carbon?

The sol/terra/astra, haiku/sonnet/opus clicked without needing to be explained

Maybe the confusion is the plan; keep people talking.

No matter what you do you can't go wrong if you spin it right!

Same, my eyebrows about jumped off my face. To go from Google as normal -- product announced, rolls out randomly in some access modalities, mysteriously doesn't in others because no org talks to any other org -- to "wait wtf is this new model I didn't even hear about this" is so laughably bizarre. Not going to get used to it, I know Google.

For Google Workspace users: please replace the ancient 3.1 Pro in Gemini. I think it's 10 months old...

The general trend -- naming models classes after objects from some implicitly ordered set -- was started by Anthropic. It's generally fine, but they didn't leave enough headroom for their largest models, so the implied ordering for opus/fable/mythos is kind of muddled to the average person.

Small/medium/large/etc. has the most easily deducible ordering, but it's not great from a marketing perspective and also has headroom issues unless you're ok with names like gpt-8-xxxxl.

OpenAI's naming is probably the best. The ordering is easily deducible and there's plenty of headroom in both directions. Tons of cool sci-fi sounding names still on the table, and it also comes with the implication that they're approaching a singularity.

I don't know what Google is doing. It's kind of impressive to have an inconsistent ordering after only three names.

Yea, it’s Terra 6.1 and Sonnet 5.5 level performance, per the benchmarks. Like you, I was left wondering whether this was better or worse than Argon, etc. It’s not intuitive; gotta read the fine print.