Model Name Abstraction: Why Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini Are Hiding Technical Details from Users

From opus to fast: how AI companies are simplifying model choice to drive user adoption.

Author

Olabinjo Adeniran
March 30, 2026

In partnership with

I’ll admit it. It’s kinda hard not to talk about AI products in the technology industry today. AI is everywhere, and it can be a bit annoying. One good thing, though, is that as companies launch products, make tweaks, and market them, we can learn a lot from their processes and apply them to our work. It’s also incredible to document industry changes at this scale.

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Let us begin. As usual, please feel free to skip to sections you like if you’re in a browser.

Table of Contents

 

Introduction - Does anyone know what the models mean?

When ChatGPT launched in 2022, its parent company, OpenAI, went live with an artificial intelligence model tagged GPT-3.5. By March 2023, GPT-4 launched, promising a more powerful model including multimodal understanding and better reasoning. OpenAI kept launching these models, GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o, GPT 4.5, GPT 4.1, GPT 4.1 mini, and even a nano GPT 4.1. This is the most dizzying paragraph I’ve written for this publication.

A lot of industry watchers like me were confused by OpenAI’s naming conventions and the complexity of communicating the models. What’s the difference between GPT 4.1 mini and nano GPT 4.1?

While OpenAI’s naming system makes no sense to keen observers, it is not the only guilty party here. Google launched a bunch of multiple different models for its chatbot. The Gemini 3 family of models has Gemini 3.1 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash and Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite. Anthropic fares better, grouping its family of models under 3 umbrellas: Opus, Haiku, and Sonnet.

Because these artificial intelligence companies compete with each other for brand share and sometimes investment dollars, every AI company spins out models every other week, each with its own weird name and an accompanying blog post explaining how it differs. Most chatbot users do not read these and do not need to.

In my opinion, it was never clear why a chatbot consumer like me, who simply wanted ideas for blog post titles, social media captions, company research, and gadget comparisons, needed to know the names of these models. It only became important to know these models when I started building software that required them.

In the last few months, I have noticed that the three biggest chatbots have modified their user interfaces, moving model names to the background and reserving model-name communications for enterprise and technical users.

Let’s take a look at examples from Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude.

Google’s Gemini Near-Complete Model Abstraction

Google’s Gemini attempts to completely abstract out model names. While the menu drop-down still shows “Gemini 3”, Google realises that mini, pro, flash and flash lite mean absolutely nothing to the average person trying to find answers. It has abstracted model names and replaced them with “Fast” “, Thinking, and “Pro”. Under each option, it quickly explains what the user can expect from selecting each option. Gemini, however, still uses “3.1 Pro” to describe the pro model.

In the screenshot below, Gemini retains some complexity for users who want to upgrade. Since Gemini has generous limits, a user who wishes to upgrade will likely conduct some model research. Still, it balances technical complexities like “our agentic development platform” with benefits like “Get higher access to our most capable model“.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Complete Model Abstraction

In the free ChatGPT plan, users do not see any model names. It simply describes what each option does in two or three words.

Going further, a user upgrading doesn’t receive messaging about models, token or memory limits. OpenAI simply communicates features and benefits.

Claude’s Stylish Model Explanation

In this list, Anthropic’s Claude is the only product that lists model names. Its attempt goes further by quickly explaining what each model does for the user. Opus 4.5 is a bit off the mark, though. What is “ambitious work”?

In an attempt to upgrade, Anthropic does not communicate any model names but proposes more features and benefits like memory across conversations, Claude in applications like Excel and Chrome, and access to Claude Code and Cowork - two of its most buzzy products.

Conclusion - Why is this happening?

At the onset of new technology, the technology industry gets bogged down by technical terminology. Model announcements remind me of the era of HTML5 and CSS3, when websites displayed badges indicating which version of HTML or CSS their developers used. Eventually, it becomes obvious that consumers do not need to understand how you’ve built your website or what models you use in your artificial intelligence chatbot.

Technology industry analyst Benedict Evans shares some thoughts on chatbot usage - specifically referring to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Source: Benedict Evans.

The one place where OpenAI does have a clear lead today is in the user base: it has 8-900m users. The trouble is, there’re only ‘weekly active’ users: the vast majority even of people who already know what this is and know how to use it have not made it a daily habit. Only 5% of ChatGPT users are paying, and even US teens are much more likely to use this a few times a week or less than they are to use it multiple time a day. The data that OpenAI released in its ‘2025 wrapped’ promotion tells us that 80% of users sent less than 1,000 ‘messages’ in 2025.”

By abstracting model names, Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT are hoping to improve user adoption. Model names are unnecessary complexity for the average chatbot user, and the abstraction of model names is a step in the right direction as these companies aim to achieve mass adoption and daily use of their products.

For technical users like software development teams, though, model technicalities will always matter.

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