Base models are technical products. Apps like ChatGPT use the base model to deliver value. I suppose apps benefit more from branding than the base models themselves.

Good background, it makes sense that they might take this approach since they are writing software... but it still makes for awful branding.

Why Does Every AI Product Name Have a Decimal?

Its common practice in software dev to label releases with a major.minor.patch (i.e. v0.1.23) version notation. A bump in major version represents a huge architectural difference, or rewrite, or release of many big features, and/or incompatibility with previous versions. Whereas a bump in minor version is less significant, but still probably has lots of improvements. A bump in patch version is likely just a bugfix or less noticeable change.

The naming convention for LLMs likely stems from this as well. It has little to do with fractions or doing math. Its just a way to see at a glance how a piece of software is improving over time. Bigger number usually means better/battle-tested. 
