All 3 models are tuned for general purpose work.

Model size isn’t how you pick which model to use. You pick based on performance in evals compared to price.

It’s not hard to imagine that the more expensive models are probably larger or having higher compute requirements.

But generally: These are not consumer facing products and I agree that someone who uses the API should be able to figure out the price point of different models.

Holy cow I never realized and I had to keep checking which model was which, I never had managed to remember which model was which size before because I never realized there was a theme with the names!

How is this more clear than 5.4 > 5.2 > 5.1?

OpenAI used familiar numeric versioning instead of clever word names. Normally this choice would appeal to software devs, not gather criticism.