Kaiser: OpenAI model names are now detached from technical milestones
Łukasz Kaiser · What’s Next for AI? OpenAI’s Łukasz Kaiser (Transformer Co-Author) · Nov 26, 2025 · at 44:51
Łukasz Kaiser, Lead Research Scientist at OpenAI, explains why OpenAI abandoned naming models after underlying pre-training or reinforcement learning runs in favor of capability-based branding.
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“Now the naming is by capability, right? GPT-Five is a capable model. 5.1 is a more capable model. Mini is the smaller model that's slightly less capable, but faster and cheaper. And the thinking models are the ones that do more research, right? In that sense, the naming is detached from any technical”
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