Improving GPT-5.6 Sol in ChatGPT—and expanding access for free users

They must really be feeling the commoditization pressure. I'm not sure what the way out of this is, ChatGPT and Claude are still good products, but they are not necessarily premium products anymore.

I expect a few things to happen in the next year:

1) Exclusive MCP server deals/API integrations

2) Significant switch to B2B marketing, even moreso than we've seen before, with API interfaces being paid and chat-client interfaces becoming more and more free, perhaps just with limits more on integrations or data visualization/analysis

3) US restrictions on B2B contracts with non-US hosted models that do any sort of contracting with the government

Obviously there's a bunch of stuff I'm not foreseeing. But it really does feel like the bottom of the market is collapsing into free. I assume OpenAI and Anthropic think their next generation of models will restore their halo tier status and that the cash burn is justified to just get there, but this has to really mess up IPO plans.

> Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We’re introducing updates to ChatGPT that improve everyday conversations while expanding access for Free users.

This clearly implies that they believe ChatGPT models are AGI and are now willing to say it out loud.

Which I think is a fair interpretation of the term. They are general purpose intelligence in that you can get help from them about almost anything. They are not like narrow single purpose AI models.

I don't think we need that term to mean "can completely emulate a human" or "can do every task any human on earth can do as well as them".

It also needs to be differentiated from ASI with godlike powers many times greater than human.

Giving free ChatGPT users access to reasoning (the 'Think' toggle) will have a broader impact on the world than every new paid model and coding agent combined.

I can't wait to never see a reasoning button ever again. Why do I have to reason about what reasoning level to use?

I think it’s a misread to think the default ChatGPT model switching to GPT 5.6 Luna is some sort of desperation move. Keep in mind that Claude .ai never had this extreme stratification between the frontier models and the free tier (Sonnet is available to free users with rate limits).

So 5.6 Luna is just their next version of what they used to call 5.5 instant tier

And 5.x instant models were never much to write home about anyway so the default ChatGPT free model hasn’t been particularly distinctive since 4o

free unlimited luna is a pretty badass move

luna is very good

Does 5.6 Sol finally have an "instant" form? Is that the change?

Its always fun to try to read between the lines here to speculate why they are doing this.

Maybe Luna efficiency gain was actually significant enough that putting all the free users and giving them super generous limits makes sense.

They might be doing this to improve the messaging of AI among causal users since right now there is a huge amount of datacenter backlash in the US due to AI grievances.

Maybe they have too much excess capacity or they really want to juice token numbers and market share on their dashboards for marketing.

I also wonder if being given access to an actually a decent model like luna with actual thinking budget instead of brainless "instant" modes will start to make causal users understand the real capabilities of these models.

a m-dash in the title? whoa things are degrading fast

I dont pay for a chatgpt subscription, but sometimes I did use the web app for throwaway questions. GPT 5.5 Instant or whatever it was that they had was absolutely horrendous. Never answered a question straight and was pedantic in a way even a redditor wouldn't be. So I dropped it and just opened my paid coding agent for everything. Grok.com is quite good now with grok 4.5 though and I find myself using that often. Hopefully luna will be similar.

At first I thought the Sol updates was perhaps trying to help with some complaints of Sol burning through tokens, complaints that have prompted some new data points on https://codex-resets.com/ .

But seeing the graphic with the visual weather report: that makes me think that is not the goal at all. :)

  Every week, 1 billion people turn to ChatGPT for everything from quick questions and web searches to planning, research, advice, and complex decisions.

Guess, Google's AI Mode is chipping away at their consumers (I know I haven't used Chat in a long, long while for 'quick questions and web searches' after OpenAI did away with "think" which I always use). The money-minting office & coding market Anthropic has cornered is hyper-competitive at both the frontier & low-cost ends. OpenAI is reactive [0] and seems right up against it, despite the strength of its excellent models.

[0] Won't put it past OpenAI (and/or Google) to open weight larger models!