I just can’t believe nobody at the company has enough courage to tell their leadership that their naming scheme is completely stupid and insane. Four is greater than three, and so four should be better than three. The point of a name is to describe something so that you don’t confuse your users, not to be cute.
The reason their naming scheme is so bad is because their initial attempts at GPT-5 failed in training. It was supposed to be done ~1 year ago. Because they'd promised that GPT-5 would be vastly more intelligent than GPT-4, they couldn't just name any random model "GPT-5", so they suddenly had to start naming things differently. So now there's GPT-4.5, GPT-4.1, the o-series, ...
Even o3 can't figure out the naming scheme. When asked to generate names that would be easier to use by non-technical people, it assumed o3 and o4 are the smallest models:
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Below is one straightforward, user-friendly approach you could adopt.
It keeps two dimensions only—generation and tier—and reserves an optional “optimisation” suffix for special-purpose variants (e.g. vision, coding, long-context).
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1. Core conventions
Element Purpose Example values
Generation Major architectural release. Keep a whole number; use “.1”, “.2”… for mid-cycle improvements. 4, 4.1, 4.5
Tier Rough capability / cost band, easy to interpret. Lite, Standard, Pro, Ultra
Suffix (optional) Special optimisation or domain specialisation. -LongCtx, -Vision, -Code
Why this works
• No ambiguous letters or numerics – “o3” can be read as “03” or “oz”; avoid that entirely.
• Self-explanatory language – non-technical users recognise “Lite” versus “Pro” instantly.
• Scalable – new minor rev? bump the generation (4.2). Need a cheaper size? add a Nano tier without disturbing the rest.
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2. Applying it to your current list
Current name Proposed new name Rationale
GPT-4o GPT-4 Standard Baseline flagship of the 4-series.
o3 GPT-4 Lite Same generation, lowest tier.
o4-mini GPT-4 Lite+ (or GPT-4 Lite LongCtx if that’s the point) Indicates “Lite” family but a bit more capable; “+” or a suffix clarifies how.
o4-mini-high GPT-4 Standard LongCtx (or GPT-4 Lite Pro) Pick one dimension: either it’s still “Lite” but higher context, or it has moved into “Standard”.
GPT-4.5 GPT-4.5 Standard Mid-cycle architectural upgrade, default tier.
GPT-4.1 GPT-4.1 Standard Ditto.
GPT-4.1-mini GPT-4.1 Lite Same generation, smaller/cheaper option.
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3. Quick style guide for future models
1. Stick to two words (or two words + optional suffix)
GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5 Lite-Vision – still readable at a glance.
2. Reserve extra punctuation for special cases only
Hyphens or the “+” symbol should signal meaning, not be decorative.
3. Publish a public matrix
A small table in docs or the dashboard that maps Generation × Tier → context length, cost, latency eliminates guesswork.
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One-line summary
GPT- [-Specialisation] keeps names short, descriptive and future-proof—so even non-technical users can tell instantly which model suits their needs.
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In my experience, o4-mini has been fast and accurate enough for most use cases. If needed, I use o4-mini-high. I just bother to use o3 when there’s a gnarly issue to solve and I can wait its long response times.
If you obfuscate the naming, you obfuscate the value proposition, and people become easier to mislead into choosing an overly expensive model. Same as with Intel CPUs, or many many other hardware products.
At Techcrunch AI last week, the OpenAI guy started his presentation by acknowledging that OpenAI knows their naming is a problem and they're working on it, but it won't be fixed immediately.
I’d honestly prefer they just have 3 personas of varying cost/intelligence: Sam, Elmo and Einstein or something, and then tack on the date, elmo-2025-1 and silently delete the old ones.
