I agree with them, Sol, Terra, and Luna are confusing names. They mean the same thing as GPT-5.6-Max, GPT-5.6-Plus, and GPT-5.6-Fast but require base knowledge for an analogy.
It feels like it was adding by the marketing department.
Similar to Anthropic's size/length based naming: Opus > Sonnet > Haiku
These names seem easy to understand to me, and much clearer than suffixes like -max and -plus.
You don't actually explain why or how these names are "easy to understand" just state that they simply are. That's great; to me, they aren't obvious or intuitive at all. May have well just start randomly pointing at dictionary words.
I'll admit though that until recently I never really thought about Anthropic's naming scheme as having meaning (an Opus being longer than a Sonnet, being longer than a Haiku).
Or something like dog/puppy/sperm.
But do they though? When do you use GPT-5.6-Max-Low vs. GPT-5.6-Plus High? Or GPT-5.6-Fast-Xhigh? What's the Pareto optimal choice (outcome and price)? According to the benches it seems to bop around and the even if the benches are accurate the best choice isn't always consistent.
You don't, because that isn't something I proposed using for model naming.
I called them GPT-5.6-Max, GPT-5.6-Plus, and GPT-5.6-Fast. Reasoning levels are distinct from the model design itself, and the UI makes that clear.
Plus, using that same flawed argument this would be called GPT-5.6-Sol-Low or GPT-5.6-Luna-High which also makes no sense/is confusing. So that argument applies (or more accurately doesn't), no matter the model names.
Anthropic ships models with a helpful one-liner tag that makes the model hierarchy obvious. I think it wouldn't hurt if OpenAI did the same.
I already know plenty who had no clue what the difference between Terra and Luna would be.