I wonder what about this one gets the +0.5 to the name. IIRC the 2.0 model isn’t particularly old yet. Is it purely marketing, does it represent new model structure, iteratively more training data over the base 2.0, new serving infrastructure, etc?
I’ve always found the use of the *.5 naming kinda silly when it became a thing. When OpenAI released 3.5, they said they already had 4 underway at the time, they were just tweaking 3 be better for ChatGPT. It felt like a scrappy startup name, and now it’s spread across the industry. Anthropic naming their models Sonnet 3, 3.5, 3.5 (new), 3.7 felt like the worst offender of this naming scheme.
I’m a much bigger fan of semver (not skipping to .5 though), date based (“Gemini Pro 2025”), or number + meaningful letter (eg 4o - “Omni”) for model names.
I would consider this a case of "expectation management"-based versioning. This is a release designed to keep Gemini in the news cycle, but it isn't a significant enough improvement to justify calling it Gemini 3.0.
I think it's reasonable. The development process is just not really comparable to other software engineering: It's fairly clear that currently nobody really has a good grasp on what a model will be while they are being trained. But they do have expectations. So you do the training, and then you assign the increment to align the two.
I figured you don't update the major unless you significantly change the... algorithm, for lack of a better word. At least I assume something major changed between how they trained ChatGPT 3 vs GPT 4, other than amount of data. But maybe I'm wrong.
As I see it, if it uses a similar training approach and is expected to be better in every regard, then it's a minor release. Whereas when they have a new approach and where there might be some tradeoffs (e.g. longer runtime), it should be a major change. Or if it is very significantly different, then it should be considered an entirely differently named model.
Or drop the pretext of version numbers entirely since they're meaningless here and go back to classics like Gemini Experience, Gemini: Millennium Edition or Gemini New Technology
I’ve always found the use of the *.5 naming kinda silly when it became a thing. When OpenAI released 3.5, they said they already had 4 underway at the time, they were just tweaking 3 be better for ChatGPT. It felt like a scrappy startup name, and now it’s spread across the industry. Anthropic naming their models Sonnet 3, 3.5, 3.5 (new), 3.7 felt like the worst offender of this naming scheme.
I’m a much bigger fan of semver (not skipping to .5 though), date based (“Gemini Pro 2025”), or number + meaningful letter (eg 4o - “Omni”) for model names.