Though it gets even more confusing because they also have effort levels so it’s not really possible to call one fast and one slow since Fable on Medium will be faster than Opus on Max.
I agree it’s confusing, and now OpenAI is following Anthropic’s lead with their new naming (Sol, Terra, Luna).
A similar complaint was valid years ago when OpenAI had GPT-4o, o1, o3 (but no o2), o4-mini-high, GPT-4, and GPT-4.1 and GPT-3.5 etc.
Arguably the complaint was more valid for those older GPT models you mentioned.
Some models like ViTs use something similar but then introduce words with no unambiguous order, like Small, Medium/Base, Large but then I always forget if Huge or Giant is larger.
Also fwiw I’ve never found LLM benchmarks to match reality based on my own usage, not for the large frontier models or smaller open weight models so who knows if Opus is actually better than Fable (I doubt it).
Fable 5.1 or whatever they go with will be the stronger version vs Opus 5.
From about 2 hours of Opus 5 use , I would say it is quite impressive.
> Suggestion for a better naming system: use the words "Pro", "Plus", etc.: Claude 5 Pro, Claude 5 Standard, Claude 5 Fast, Claude 5 Mini.
This is not possible: Standard (Free) / Pro / Max are plan names. Fast is a mode.
And fables are not particularly long actually.
And people know this? I didn't. I am not into music or poetry so these are not terms I am familiar with.
fable: 99/100 sonnet: 97/100 haiku: 91/100 opus: 89/100
So while these terms are almost universally known, opus is indeed the least known of the four. And I guess this only measures whether a person knows a word, not whether they know an opus is longer than a sonnet! Personally I only inferred that based on the related term 'magnum opus.'