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Comment by jedbrooke | Hacker News Reader

I still don’t know how openAI thought it was a good idea to have a model named "4o" AND a model named "o4", unless the goal was intentional confusion

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Even ChatGPT (and certainly Google) confuses the names.

I'm sure there is some internal/academic reason for them, but from an outside observer simply horrible.

Wasn't "ChatGPT" itself only supposed to be a research/academic name, until it unexpectedly broke containment and they ended up having to roll with it? The naming was cursed from the start.

When picking a fight with product marketing, just don't.

How many times have you noticed people confusing the name itself: ChatGBT, ChatGTP etc.

We're the technical crowd cursed and blinded by knowledge.

Considering how many people say ChatGTP too

The other day I heard ChatGBD.

Have you heard Boris Johnson's version?

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/JAVMEs5CG1Y

I'm gonna watch this again about 5 times because it's so fucking funny

The comments have their own overdose of deliciousness. That click to look at them, never disappoints :-)

This one was great hahaha

MY favourite is ChatJippiddy

Do you watch primagen by instance?

A fellow Primagen viewer spotted.

Or just "gippity" for short.

The Primeagen :).

ChagGDP because a country worth of money was spent to train it.

I’ve been hearing that consistently from a friend, I gave up on correcting them because “ChatGPT” just wouldn’t stick

I still don't like how French people don't call it "chat j'ai pété".

GTP goes forward from the middle, teeth, then lips, as compared to GPT which goes middle, lips, teeth; you'll see this pattern happen with a lot of words in linguistic history

Even more than that, I've seen a lot of people confuse 4 and 4o, probably because 4o sounds like a shorthand for 4.0 which would be the same thing as 4.

Come to think of it, maybe they had a play on 4o being “40”, and o4-mini being “04”, and having to append the “mini” to bring home the message of 04<40

It's almost always marketing and some stupid idea someone there had. I don't know why non-technical people try and claim so much ownership over versioning. You nearly always end up with these ridiculous outcomes.

"I know! Let's restart the version numbering for no good reason!" becomes DOOM (2016), Mortal Kombat 1 (2025), Battlefield 1 (2016), Xbox One (not to be confused with the original Xbox 1)

As another example, look at how much of a trainwreck USB 3 has become

Or how Nvidia restarted Geforce card numbering

Xbox should be in the hall of fame for terrible names.

There's also Xbox One X, which is not in the X series. Did I say that right? Playstation got the version numbers right. I couldn't make names as incomprehensible as Xbox if I tried.

Rumor has it they were jelly because the Playstation 3 had one higher version number than what would have been the Xbox 2, so it became the Xbox 360 instead. And then got further off the rails when its replacement arrived

"4o" was bad to begin with, as "four-oh" is a common verbalization of "4.0".

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