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Comment by elAhmo | Hacker News Reader

I know a few of my comments are related to this, but these new names are horrible. Why introduce ANOTHER layer of confusion and drop the mini, nano suffixes that people got used to?

How does this go through so many layers of management at a trillion dollar company without who has a say raising this? I simply can't believe how stupid the naming scheme from OpenAI was and continues to be even after they acknowledged it earlier.

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Because they want a Haiku, Sonnet, Opus equivalent I guess?

Exactly, and I think the tipping point was how many times “Fable” was mentioned the last weeks

Then they should have just called it Fairytale

Confabulation

Perchance

You can't just say perchance.

And the names they came up with mirror the names OAI models come up with when I try to have them suggest codenames for projects. Just lacking any sort of imagination or coherence.

The funny thing is they had the decision to go with some less or more pretentious...

My theory is that they don't have Fable-class intelligence so they needed different hype vehicle :) This rename helps build excitement a bit more than just releasing ordinary GPT-5.6 increment.

I think OpenAI can also use the naming playbooks of current Intel and AMD of 2000s.

Possibilities are endless:

    - OpenAI GPT 5.6 F5+
    - OpenAI GPT5-6000FT
    - OpenAI GPT5-6505FS
    - OpenAI GPT5-6F05UL

Sounds nice, looks cool. Why not?

> OpenAI can also use the naming playbooks of current Intel

Past Intel had way better naming.

It'd just be OpenAI GPT 5.6++++++++++++++

Or NVIDIA.

OpenAI GptForce 5600 XT

You can go far beyond that:

OpenAI GptForce FX6800TI Founders Edition, for example.

I mostly used GPT-Venti for the complex part, but the documentation was done by either GPT-Grande or GPT-Tall.

On a more serious note, I can vividly imagine how difficult it is to agree on a set of words that could plausibly suggest a relational meaning while remaining non-diminutive in every individual model name. Adding to the complexity, it is going to be used globally, and the main competitor already has an arguably successful, fabulous naming scheme.

It sounds like a PR minefield.

Yet, in a month we'll be fine. We were fine with Anthropic naming models by music. I'm sure celestial bodies will be OK too. Larger = better. It's simple. As for the why? Marketing, making products feel "fresh", exciting, new, something alluring that we didn't have before. So, much like since industrialization.

What surprises me is not this, but that OpenAI changed things up without syncing with a GPT 6.

If you ever find out, let me know. My department at work has been renamed so many times, I don't even know our current name.

(At least in Europe) Toyota used to name their models "Sol", "Luna" and "Terra" as well. Sol had all the trimmings, Terra had the least.

It sounded nicer than something like "Luxury" and "Basic".

> Sol had all the trimmings, Terra had the least.

That’s interesting. My understanding is that:

Sol = Sun Terra = Earth Luna = Moon

So it’s a bit surprising that in Toyota’s nomenclature, Terra is the basic trim instead of Luna.

I always understood it as "the further from the (dirty/basic) Earth, the more luxurious".

Nano and mini, which is smaller? This is a bit more clear imo. It also helps for expectations, bigger isn't necessarily better for all use cases.

(Well given the limited amount of things we can deduce from a name)

> Nano and mini, which is smaller?

mini > micro (see, e.g., -skirts, -computers)

micro > nano (see, SI)

so, mini > nano.

Because people weren't using the mini and nano models. Like someone else said those are awful marketing names.

well I'm using mini models and GPT-5.4-mini is better than Gemini 3.1 Pro (considerably faster in exchange for less broad world knowledge) and 3.5 Flash (that one's trash by itself)

You are, sure, but I wonder how many weren't due to the name. In many people's minds, it's like, why even bother with a non frontier model? Especially if they're not paying for it, via their employers' subscriptions. This new OpenAI naming changes it though, they equate Sol to Fable so people will use Terra instead which has roughly 5.5 performance, thereby saving inference for OpenAI.

so many layers of management

Sounds like the source of your problem, right there.

Honestly, "mini" and "nano" to me just seem like really awful names from a marketing perspective - they might as well call it "lobotomized crap version of GPT" and "even more lobotomized crap version of GPT".

Whereas Sol/Luna/Terra reads more like "GPT for hard/medium/basic problems".

I disagree. I needed a small text to json model that would parse basic info into a json, nothing else. I instantly knew to start with nano and if not good enough, use mini. This was obvious to me, just looking at the name. Now you have to actually know what those names mean. And I can guarantee you they'll add 5 more to create more hype, or make new names in whatever the next-gen-world-breaking-dangerous-model will be.

See, you are already confused: it's Sol/Terra/Luna, descending order by diameter. One is tempted to put the Sun and the Moon before the Earth, as those are "celestial".

So, Terra should work for most "down-to-earth" problems, Luna is for light-weight stuff (because less gravity?), and if you really want to burn tokens like there's no tomorrow, you go for the fusion furnace at the center of our solar system?

It's the same issue with American and ISO date formats again. I mean, it's 8/7/2026 today, what's the problem?

Marketing... that is all

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