It is pretty clear at this point that the frontier models need only handful of tiered models.
1. Ultra - The best and the most expensive for showing off and government.
2. Pro - Almost best but substantially cheaper for most productive people.
3. Flash - Workhorse for everyone.
4. Lite - For the unwashed masses and peasants.
There is no need to attach anything to these labels. In fact industry could simply standardize these namings like SEMVER.
There could be an internal representation which could give specific number of the model but these companies should move on to be more like Chrome. No one knows or cares which version of chrome they are on.
For a lot of systems the real underlying version would matter because of reliability. That can be provided to those power users.
There's a tier which is just, "summarize things and do grammar checks, style tweaks, and boilerplate generation". Maybe this is Lite. It's like how computing requirements for most people nowadays is "run a browser".
depends on what being good at grammar entails. If it's just following rules, then you're not wrong. If it involves adapting concepts to novel circumstances, we're doing well.
And that’s exactly where it starts to get murky, because this isn’t a clear gradient after all but a matrix of different qualities for different tasks. Reasoning effort levels are one factor here, but the whole speed vs. Quality topic is another.
As an example, Linux distros say, Ubuntu got its project "names" as well as SEMVERs. But people rarely use project names but uses versions.
You tell me, I use "Jammy Jellyfish". I will be like WTF dood. You tell me 22.04 LT (which is one I use), oh yeah, that's a good one.
Same thing here. companies can call whatever SOTA whatever they want. But in the end people will refer to them as just Gemini 4 or Ultr/Pro/Lite however people like to use.
Just leave it to company's discretion. Don't enforce anything. People will figure out how to call it.
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And wtf, a peaseant?
I use your so-stupidly-called ultra/med/lite but in diff situations, and when I use lite that doesn't mean I am peasant, I am being sensible
1. Ultra - The best and the most expensive for showing off and government. 2. Pro - Almost best but substantially cheaper for most productive people. 3. Flash - Workhorse for everyone. 4. Lite - For the unwashed masses and peasants.
There is no need to attach anything to these labels. In fact industry could simply standardize these namings like SEMVER.
There could be an internal representation which could give specific number of the model but these companies should move on to be more like Chrome. No one knows or cares which version of chrome they are on.
For a lot of systems the real underlying version would matter because of reliability. That can be provided to those power users.