That's definitely a problem too.

But minor credit to Anthropic, at least they've mostly stuck to their four model names (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, and Fable). You mostly know where a model is MEANT to be positioned from the name alone. OpenAI cannot keep it consistent from release to release.

But, yes, currently Opus Vs. Fable has the same issue as Sol-6.1 Vs. Astra.

I don't know why this is so hard to understand.

It's like iPhone 17 being faster than iPhone 16 Pro. Because it's newer and benefits from advances in chip architecture, despite being a lower model tier. Sometimes different iPhone models are released at different times.

Yeah this isn't intuitive at all.

Both companies have screwed up their naming royally. Maybe that's intentional - I'm sure it doesn't hurt Anthropic to have people using Fable a bit longer than they need to and racking up a huge bill in the process.