On the one hand, if OpenAI makes a bad choice, it’s still a bad choice to copy it.
On the other hand, OpenAI has moved to a naming convention where they seem to use a name for the model: “GPT-4”, “GPT-4 Turbo”, “GPT-4o”, “GPT-4o mini”. Separately, they use date strings to represent the specific release of that named model. Whereas Anthropic had a name: “Claude Sonnet”, and what appeared to be an incrementing version number: “3”, then “3.5”, which set the expectation that this is how they were going to represent the specific versions.
Now, Anthropic is jamming two version strings on the same product, and I consider that a bad choice. It doesn’t mean I think OpenAI’s approach is great either, but I think there are nuances that say they’re not doing exactly the same thing. I think they’re both confusing, but Anthropic had a better naming scheme, and now it is worse for no reason.
> Now, Anthropic is jamming two version strings on the same product, and I consider that a bad choice. It doesn’t mean I think OpenAI’s approach is great either, but I think there are nuances that say they’re not doing exactly the same thing
Anthropic has always had dated versions as well as the other components, and they are, in fact, doing exactly the same thing, except that OpenAI has a base model in each generation with no suffix before the date specifier (what I call the "Model Class" on the table below), and OpenAI is inconsistent in their date formats, see:
Major Family Generation Model Class Date
claude 3.5 sonnet 20041022
claude 3.0 opus 20240229
gpt 4 o 2024-08-06
gpt 4 o-mini 2024-07-18
gpt 4 - 0613
gpt 3.5 turbo 0125
But did they ever have more than one release of Claude 3 Sonnet? Or any other model prior to today?
As far as I can tell, the answer is “no”. If true, then the fact that they previously had date strings would be a purely academic footnote to what I was saying, not actually relevant or meaningful.
On the other hand, OpenAI has moved to a naming convention where they seem to use a name for the model: “GPT-4”, “GPT-4 Turbo”, “GPT-4o”, “GPT-4o mini”. Separately, they use date strings to represent the specific release of that named model. Whereas Anthropic had a name: “Claude Sonnet”, and what appeared to be an incrementing version number: “3”, then “3.5”, which set the expectation that this is how they were going to represent the specific versions.
Now, Anthropic is jamming two version strings on the same product, and I consider that a bad choice. It doesn’t mean I think OpenAI’s approach is great either, but I think there are nuances that say they’re not doing exactly the same thing. I think they’re both confusing, but Anthropic had a better naming scheme, and now it is worse for no reason.