Appreciate that these things have orthogonal measurements; with that in mind, given that the name signifies size, what does version number signify?
I.e. are all version numbers independent and Model X 7.5 is not necessarily of the same generation or cut off as Model Y 7.5? Or do all of your 6.1 models have something in common - cut off data, generation, baseline technology, approach, architecture, or something else?
Thanks! :)
These days, version number signifies a few things at once: the order of release, the relationship to other releases, and the magnitude of improvement. So something like 6.1 would indicate it was launched after 5.6, may share some similarities to other 6.1 models in terms of training data / personality (which is why it's not 5.7), and isn't a giant enough leap to merit the headlines and expectations that would come with a 7.
Back in the day we used numbers to also sometimes indicate size, which could make it extra confusing: e.g., we launched GPT-4.1 (an incremental update on GPT-4) after GPT-4.5 (a new model that was a big jump over GPT-4).