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