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Comment by the__alchemist | Hacker News Reader

Hey! I think it's confusing because there is a mix of three components:

  - Model name
  - Version number
  - Effort level

All 3 of these are a one-dimensional balance of price/speed, and capability (Loose terms). The confusion is in how these overlap, how they're announced/marketed etc. So you go from 1 dimensions to 3; you can visualize it as a box. For a given task, how do you choose where in this box you select? Which regions are your favorite? Can you map each region of this 3D space to specific tasks? Label them with intuitive names?

Given the operations of the model are opaque, can you see how someone (most people?) might be confused?

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But what's the ask? This is the cleanest way I see of them doing it.

I see a ton of criticism and not a single person coming up with anything better, unless it's to take away options, like removing effort level.

What about buying Intel CPUs? A car? Electrical components?

If you're not just using this at a consumer level to ask about cooking recipes (and if that's your use case, you really don't care about API pricing, or any of this, and can just use the default), and are using it professionally, then this seems like a low bar of effort to understand what you're buying.

I do grant you the relationship between model and effort level has an unclear relationship, but there are also tradeoffs in most complex technical products that are not always clear; this is exacerbated by the fact that this product is stochastic.

Why are engineers using this as a professional tool expecting this to be bought like a consumer gadget and then blaming the maker?

“The ask” is give me a clue how to choose the best settings for a specific task. Model releases happen so often that the calculation keeps changing. Maybe even OpenAI doesn’t always know the answer.

This morning I asked GPT which models and settings I should use to inspect my VM dashboard with computer control. It said: - GPT-6 Astra at Medium - GPT-6.1 Sol at Medium (alt) - use Luna only when the route was already known.

But I had already completed the task twice with Luna and it was 5.6! It navigated through a few pages of my dashboard, pulled up the 30-day usage chart, analyzed my CPU and RAM, and explained why I didn’t need an upgrade. I’d give Luna 5.6 an A on this task.

Maybe OpenAI should give us a “Tiptronic” selector: recommend the model and reasoning level based on the prompt, while still letting users override it.

> “The ask” is give me a clue how to choose the best settings for a specific task.

What are you talking about? If it's for some slop you vibe check it. If it's for a serious effort you write an eval. Same as it has been for the last 3 years.

The OpenAI employee above says that some smaller models of the same generation are better at certain tasks than larger models, regardless of cost difference.

They should have a guide saying "Terra is best at technical documentation and communication, Astra is best at large software projects and research, Sol is good for development" or something like that.

Then he qualified to say it depends on the unique details of the documentation. I don't think its possible. You have to try all models with effort and compare all or go on reputation or vibes.

These names are not just for engineers.

Why is it ok for engineers to have confusing names and ways to interact with something?

How am I supposed to decide between these options: https://imgur.com/a/bXHWowL

How am I supposed to keep up with the changes every few months?

"How am I supposed to keep up with the changes every few months?"

No worries, you can always ask a AI.

You are showing a selection from some third-party interface that mixes together models from six different suppliers: Mistral, Kimi, OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic and Google, with a bunch of old obsolete models.

Are you presenting this as evidence that OpenAI's naming scheme is bad?

If you don't want to spend the time to know the difference between all these different suppliers and their models, then why are you using whatever this program is that gives you so many choices, most of which are bad? Why is this OpenAI's fault?

There's also this "Instant" thingy which doesn't seem to be on the model-name axis but I really can't understand exactly what it is, even after asking ChatGPT about it.

Effort (as it's used in the context, how many "thinking" tokens to burn) is still a free variable. It's not always shown to the end user but you can set it independently for any of these models.

After that you just have model "strength" and version number. But of course strength is only comparable at equal version number and the two axes are almost parallel.

Anthropic also does this, perhaps to a lesser extent.

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