Anthropic's Model Naming, Extrapolated

(samwilkinson.io)

227 points | by sammycdubs 3 hours ago

38 comments

  • bensyverson 2 hours ago
    Other candidates:

    - Serial (produces an incredibly exciting response which ends in a cliffhanger that withholds the answer)

    - Prequel (instead of responding, it provides the full backstory leading up to your question)

    - Yarn (maximizes output tokens by taking a long winding route to your answer)

    - Head Canon (answers using its own entertainingly weird theories about the input)

    - Overstory (your answer is interwoven with the answers from eight other users into a larger and deeply intertwined meta-answer)

    - Oeuvre (for every question, it produces a diverse but cohesive body of work across a variety of mediums, each one a heartbreaking masterpiece in its own right)

  • mchusma 17 minutes ago
    I like "Proverb" as smaller than Haiku too, Aphorism is also good. But seriously I want Anthropic to up its small model game. Haiku is not competitive, Deepseek v4 flash outperforms my uses for about $0.10 / $0.20. Whereas Haiku 4.5 is $1/$5.

    IMO Anthropic should just play the game at all the price tiers because it otherwise forces people to go elsewhere. I would probably pay for a "Proverb"/"Aphorism" class model that was worse than Deepseek at the same price just to stay in the ecosystem, if given the option.

    (Note: I also see Google seem to make the same mistake, they actually do have competitive models in Gemma family but they don't make them available via the API. So there may be some reason for this.)

  • exabrial 1 hour ago
    Anthropic intentionally degrading responses shows you they're also focusing on the wrong things. Rather than producing the best model possible, they're nerfing their models' capabilities.
    • wahnfrieden 1 hour ago
      Users are enemies. Customers are thieves
    • dude250711 1 hour ago
      People believing myths and fables are factual perhaps can expect to be a little bit disappointed.
      • 1attice 54 minutes ago
        Was thinking similarly.

        "Fable" is not the name I would have chosen for a product that has to argue for the fact of its own economic viability but it is the correct mood. Perhaps Anthropic is trolling Zitron.

        • sebastiennight 28 minutes ago
          20 years from now we will get Claude Odyssey, and we'll have gone full circle.
  • Robin_Message 2 hours ago
    > Overwhelmingly Large Narrative Unit

    I miss Iain M Banks. Thanks for this lovely little nod to the Culture

  • bitpush 2 hours ago
    This is great. "saga" and "canon" are most definitely a future model name candidates, although for lulz I'd like to see "Cinematic Universe"
    • AbuAssar 55 minutes ago
      Zack Snyder's Saga is also a good one
  • arjie 2 hours ago
    The Dario Legendarium is definitely going to be a fun piece of work for historians to interrogate as to the origin of this age. The relative personalities of the orgs involved show somewhat in their naming: {o1,4o,3.5,5.5} vs. {Haiku,Sonnet,Opus} vs. {3.1, 3.5-pro, 3.5-flash, 3.5-flash-lite} vs. {3.7, 3.7-plus, 3.7-max}

    It's a pity that Samsung isn't in the mix. I would have liked to have used a model named Samsung Galaxy S10+ 5G Lite.

    • scrlk 1 hour ago
      And Sony as well - AI-LLM1000XM5 Mark II.
      • Insanity 40 minutes ago
        To nitpick, the “M” in XM is “mark”, no?
    • Azantys 1 hour ago
      Galaxy AI 3.8-Flash-Plus Max (xhigh)
    • andai 58 minutes ago
      Samsung Galaxy Brain S26
  • kelvinjps10 3 minutes ago
    Idk why I thought it was Simon Willianson blog, the names are kinda similar
  • renyicircle 1 hour ago
    Tractatus - highly aware of its limitations and refuses to speak about too many topics. Really likes numbering statements. Unusable due to a context window bug which is patched after considerable delay.
  • t0mpr1c3 1 hour ago
    - Prayer: Press enter and hope for the best.

    - Parable: Responds to the question that you didn't know you needed to ask.

    - Bible: Dozens of parable instances reporting in different epochs. Tokens are redeemed on expiry.

  • bhu8 2 hours ago
    I like how the original triplet's initials represent their behavior well:

    - Opus is OP, like OverPowered

    - Sonnet is SO, like your significant other (this was more meaningful in Sonnet 3.7 days)

    - Haiku is HA, like the reaction to a bad joke

    The latest model, naturally, needed three letters: FAB.

    I'm now looking forward to ABS and LO

    • andai 59 minutes ago
      Lo! I show you the Overclaude!
  • winstonp 2 hours ago
    I do think Anthropic nailed their naming down much better than OpenAI
    • dinkleberg 1 hour ago
      It would be hard to do worse than OpenAI in naming
      • fendy3002 1 hour ago
        Thankfully Microsoft doesn't let it's windows or xbox team do the naming of their latest ai model, otherwise MAI flash 360 series X will take the cake
    • andai 54 minutes ago
      I miss the days when the dropdown menu (in their consumer product with a billion users) asked me if I wanted to use o3, 4o, 4o-mini, o4-mini, gpt-4.1, gpt-4.1-mini, or gpt-4.5 (Research Preview).
  • OisinMoran 2 hours ago
    Fan Fiction: Open weight distillations / riffs
  • lynguist 1 hour ago
    Thank you for the laughter! (I laughed out loud)

    This is a well executed joke, from the design to the shortness to the being on point to the abrupt punchlines when one looks at the lower ones and it also vibes well with what we all were thinking anyway, and the unexpected seriousness of the title.

  • theahura 27 minutes ago
    'we have simon willison at home'

    (great article!)

  • LoganDark 7 minutes ago
    > Fable (xhigh) - Bankruptcy speedrun

    PREACH

  • drob518 52 minutes ago
    Claude Obituary - when you’re ready to sever ties and move on
    • sebastiennight 36 minutes ago
      If you subscribe to the orthogonality and instrumental convergence theses, Obituary is a fitting model name for whenever AGI is achieved
  • petalmind 1 hour ago
    Claude Epitaph
  • Insanity 41 minutes ago
    Would have been nicer if they stayed in the literary sphere rather than films. But funny nonetheless lol.
  • coder543 2 hours ago
    Don't forget the open weight model they could release: Free Verse.
  • rayng 1 hour ago
    I saw a comment on HN that they (Sonnet and Haiku) were originally named from a nearby coffeeshop.

    https://postscript.co/pages/shop-coffee-beans

  • xyzsparetimexyz 2 hours ago
    Canto? Epic? Libretto? Axiom?
    • backspin400 2 hours ago
      Libretto: a full story but then another model sets it to music
  • hcrisp 1 hour ago
    I asked an AI bot to do this just this morning and it also suggested:

        - Epic
        - Tale
        - Saga
        - Chronicle
        - Legend
        - Logos
    • andai 52 minutes ago
      Claude Palimpsest
  • Tepix 1 hour ago
    They should have launched with Beowulf.
  • winocm 1 hour ago
    Don't forget the word "epic" (in terms of the literary definition).
  • mekdoonggi 2 hours ago
    Claude Word: a model that returns a single word.
    • kccqzy 1 hour ago
      Claude Littera: a model so good at summarizing that it summarizes everything to a letter.

      (Unfortunately just like English a letter can also mean a correspondence.)

      • sebastiennight 31 minutes ago
        Well it's going to be a long letter anyway, because we don't have enough tokens to make it a short one. So probably a w, I guess?
  • kuboble 2 hours ago
    Corpus seems to fit and add is missing from the list
    • andai 52 minutes ago
      Claude Common Crawl
  • cyclopeanutopia 2 hours ago
    The last one will be "Killer Joke".
  • whyho 1 hour ago
    Requiem
  • hawkjo 1 hour ago
    Allegory, Reference, Anthology, Edict, Appendix
  • hmokiguess 41 minutes ago
    - Claude Potato

    - Claude Skynet

    - Claude HAL 9000

    - Claude Auto

    - Google Claude

    - Claude Whatchamacallit

  • qsort 2 hours ago
    It's almost certainly a reference to Lovecraft actually:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos

    Hopefully future models will be kind enough not to behave like malevolent gods.

    • eli 1 hour ago
      The word mythos means roughly the same as "myth" and dates to 1753.
    • Computer0 2 hours ago
      Why do you think that?
  • hmokiguess 1 hour ago
    Meanwhile Apple be like:

    Siri AI !

  • MarkusQ 26 minutes ago
    That might be the theme. Or we could be looking at something like:

    -- Mythos

    -- Fable

    -- Fantasy

    -- Delusion

    -- Pareidolia

    -- Psychosis

  • jansan 1 hour ago
    - Magnum Opus

    - Fairytale

    - Pulp Fiction

  • joseph3553 1 hour ago
    Socrates?
  • refactron_SOTA 1 hour ago
    [dead]