GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

I am yet to spend $200 on deepseek this year. Not sure what kind of usage can justify $200/month of either openai or anthropic, i'm not even talking about $500. Deepseek is faster, IMO intelligence difference is negligible and it so much cheaper that i no longer care about how much i use it. I never hit any daily/weekly quota or anything like that while working or tinkering. At this point i am OK with being 6 months behind the "frontier", purely on bang-for-buck basis and who cares which shadowy government gets my data.

There was a model called Astra-Minor, found in the files a few days ago. I assume Sol 6.1 is this, as a last minute panic rename due to Sol 6 being underwhelming while Opus 5.5 turned out really strong. I can't really explain releasing Sol 6 in any other way, especially mere days ago.

> Cached input costs just $0.10 per million tokens—95% less than standard input pricing and 50% less than GPT‑6 Sol’s cached input pricing

This is the actual big announcement. 50% cheaper cache than GPT-6 Sol will get you far more mileage on Codex.

The GPT 6 release was ... not great.

Sol 6 was so bad that I switched over to Opus 5.5 exclusively.

Huge regression compared to Sol 5.6, often doing really dumb things. Same for Luna.

Even Astra is very unreliable for coding. Brilliant for vision, sometimes just great, but it also often does very stupid things.

I'm a bit sour on OpenAI right now and skeptical that 6.1 will be much different.

(Note: this is after preferring and shilling Codex/OpenAI models for the last half year)

Ominous for the industry and investors that token price is becoming the main battleground. Could be Anthropic's rationale for IPOing this year.

Really good Hamster[0], and in my tests it's very close to Astra, and indeed ~5x cheaper.

Actually, it is so close to Astra, that I'm starting to beleive it's a slightly quantized version of Astra.

[0]: https://aibenchy.com/compare/openai-gpt-6-1-sol-xhigh/openai...

I must say that this AI thing is going more or less as I felt it would back about a year ago. I think there is no real moat in AI models. It's a commodity and the big labs have predictably been caught in a race to the bottom. Not sure if this is going to turn better or worse for all of us common folks. I must say I'm a bit happy though in the sense that "intelligence" is not going to be controlled and be rented out by a small minority.

I'm a bit late with the pelicans because I was live-blogging the keynote: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/29/openai-devday-2026-liv...

Here they are for GPT-6.1-Sol: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

They're not notably different from the GPT-6 family pelicans: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-pelicans-gr...

I love free market competition. We're getting insane advancements every day. I remember when llms used to cost an arm and a leg for decent intelligence

Can someone explain to me why on these benchmarks like these a higher effort level often has a lower score?

For example, GPT-6.1 Sol High gets 75.2% on DeepSWE and XHigh gets 71.9% and is more expensive

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-6-1-sol/#deepswe

Also, how many times did they test each condition - just once or a few times? are they showing an average of multiple attempts, etc..

What's driving the increase in release cadence here? We seem to get new models every week or so now, is this RSI?

“OpenAI's new Pro 500 plan offers OpenAI's highest usage allowance and comes with access to its new "Ultrafast" feature — it also costs $500 per month.

At the same time, OpenAI is also making its existing $200 Pro plan less appealing. In Codex and Work, $200 Pro subscribers will see their included usage decrease from 20x of what the company offers to Plus users, down to 10x of that same allowance. In ChatGPT, meanwhile, GPT-6 Pro message caps will decrease from 200 to 100 per week.”

https://www.engadget.com/2272106/openai-adds-dollar500-pro-s...

Yikes

Looking at the token prices, if this is half as good as 6-Astra for 3D model creation in Blender, it's going to be an absolute game changer.

Opus 5.5 is definitely better at coding, but nothing even comes close to 6-Astra for work in 3D graphics...

6.0 Sol was literally a week ago... Basically continuous integration for model releases at this point.

Since Luna is so dirt cheap compared to Sol/Astra it would be nice if they could set or you could reserve some small percent like 3-5% of usage pool on codex just for Luna so if you hit usage limits you can at least still run a lot of Luna.

> GPT‑6.1 Sol matches GPT‑6 Astra at roughly one-fifth of the cost

Astra is a pretty impressive model. Excited to try this.

Are most comments on HN now just astroturfed $LLM_COMPANY promotions?

Opus 5.5 is on another level, especially when it comes to mathematics implementations. You can drop it a PhD-level physical simulation (for example, a contrast-injection simulation for angiography in my case), and it just...implements it. With full-on WebGL rendering in the browser, from scratch (or using an existing library, if you prefer).

Astra requires multiple turns and fresh refactoring agents to produce good code.

Fable 5.1/Opus 5.5 isn’t different, but the first cut is better quality.

Astra is a whole order of magnitude cheaper than Fable, and the Anthropic usage limits are ridiculous. Layers on layers of limits that constantly trip.

We don’t really use Sol because Astra X High is cheap. Some have mentioned regressions but we haven’t noticed any with Astra.

If the Terminal Bench 4.0 scores are to be believed[0] GPT-6.1 is an incredibly efficient model.

Yes, benchmarks aren't real work blah blah, but the delta here is so large compared to Astra, it makes it seem like this is distilled Bel or similar.

[0]https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2105007628460109953

GPT 6 Sol is obsolete after only one week! I am glad that they are not afraid to update the models more frequently. The Navier-Stokes thing revealed that it took them only a week or two to train a model more capable than Astra, and I want the pace of public releases to keep up with that.

Impressive improvements, but GPT 6 Sol came out 7 days ago, and this one will behave differently. The panicked pace is becoming a liability, maybe they should have waited and released this as the 6.0 release

They released GPT 6 Sol literally 6 days ago. We've accelerated to a weekly model release cadence. That seems like...a big deal.

OpenAI is feeling really competitive again.

I just added an agent / coding agent into an email app, and doing it through `codex` and its Codex App Server couldn't have been easier, and the results are very compelling.

The open source harness, API around it, and friendliness for connecting a subscription puts Claude to shame right now.

A few more thoughts here https://housecat.com/blog/introducing-housecat-agent

For most sane people, OpenAI is the way to go... A lot of usage with very good models, but you know that Anthropic is laughing all the way to the bank with Opus 5.5 being "the best" model right now... There are a ton of people (and companies) that will just refuse to use anything else than the highest benchmarking model in existence.

Here's a comparison of a image->html flow for GPT 6.1 Sol vs Opus 5.5.

GPT 6.1 Sol: https://html.non.io/lcars-gpt-6.1-sol

Opus 5.5: https://html.non.io/lcars-opus-5.5

Overall, opus executes a bit better than 6.1 sol, which surprises me. Astra has been the best model for this flow so far, so the fact that Sol missed some alignment / vision pieces here is interesting. It's not bad by any means, but I think where Opus really wins is the motion animation of the svgs / final polish (scroll down to the "customize every detail" section on the homepage, the svg animation is beautiful for that).

Still, it executed quick and was quite cheap to run.

I wonder if releasing this soon sort of validates the rumor that Sol 6 was just the Terra model they bumped up and slashed the price.

Then Opus 5.5 caught them off guard and now they're actually releasing the correct sized model.

This is great. But maybe part of the motivation is that 6-Sol wasn't as good as initially advertised so they needed to tweak it. I felt a clear degradation in quality in some simple refactoring tasks vs 5.6-Sol.

I find GPT 6 to be lacking in common sense when it comes to interpreting my prompts.

I have to be more literal with it than with GPT 5.x, otherwise, it sometimes does something totally different than what I want.

It seems pretty clear that this is a much larger model than Sol 6, and you can see this in the much lower generation times. I think this is also the main explanation for the $200 plan being cut in terms of API usage.

This is because they have really aggressively priced a larger model to compete with Opus 5.5, so their margins are much worse. Consequently, the equivalent API spend on the subscription is much less.

sol-6 is terra-6. They figure that no one was using terra and they could bring the speed and cost saving of terra distilled on astra, but rebranded as the more popular sol.

Back fired because of opus 5.5.

So now we get the real sol-6 as sol-6.1, and OpenAI will eat the cost to stay competitive.

This could be invalidated if sol-6.1 is the same speed as sol-6.

I got a popup in my Codex just now saying "Try out 6.1 Sol!" and so I clicked the button to try it, and intriguingly, it set my model selector to "GPT-6 Astra Light" which makes me think 6.1 Sol may be in some way just a lighter/distilled version of Astra? defo interesting, not sure if I should read too much into it though. I see no option for directly selecting 6.1 Sol in my Codex Desktop UI.

Frontier models are being used to obtain training data from users. We burn tokens teaching OpenAI how to make a cheaper model that is almost as good. I think the new $500/month pricing strategy is a significant misstep by someone who has clearly not tried Gemini 3.8 Flash or Deepseek 4.1 Flash.

Do these benchmarks have any meaning anymore? And do the announcements seem less exciting now? (Not taking anything away from the advances we are making but it seems more incremental now?) The reliable way to tell if you'll like a model is reliable collage/X reviews to gauge a model's capability and then trying it out to see if you like the style.

The last time a model announcement felt like a leap in capability beyond other things out there was Fable - which was promptly taken away. Sol and recently Opus 5.5 were strong because they approach that capability with a lot more efficiency and don't blabber incoherently (looking at you Opus 5.1).

Deepseek is a workhorse for those who prefer open and API usage. Other than that the model announcements all just seem like a blur and quite interchangeable but I wonder if that's just me tuning out or do others feel the same way?

Surprisingly (or maybe not) it matches the performance of Astra on my benchmark[1], but is much cheaper. It is also head to head with Opus 5.5 on both the price and pass rate, but edges it out slightly.

1 - https://bench.killswitch-lang.org/

Just got access in Codex, looking forward to trying it out. Opus 5.5 has blown me away with what it's capable of doing, hopefully 6.1 will actually be a worthwhile contender.

Excited to tryout Decisions API as well.

Price/intelligence comparison with Opus 5.5 on Artificial Analysis:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=gpt-5-6-luna-low%2Ccla...

According to this, at Max it's better and cheaper than 5.5 Medium, but worse than 5.5 High. At Medium, it's better and cheaper than 5.5 Low.

> Not sure what kind of usage can justify $200/month of either openai or anthropic, i'm not even talking about $500

It's easy to hit those numbers in a day in an modern-enterprise context synthesizing from incoherent information in jira, slack, layers of codebases etc. Modern enterprise meaning a firm that has been serving a few strategic customers w/ "move fast and break things" since day 1

Hardly any comparisons to Opus 5.5, which means it's not great

The real announcement is the ultra fast mode ... Astra at 300t/s is insane!

Ok, but we need 6.1 Luna soon. 6 feels worse than 5.6 in our agentic use case.

Is it really 1/5 of the price if most people who use it are also losing 1/2 of their credits?

So when does Anthropic answer? Tomorrow?

I feel a little salty about the plan changes. I wanted to upgrade to the $200 plan a day after it was blocked. Now it only includes half the usage unless for those that got grandfathered into the x20 usage.

What happened to "we urge you to urge us to stop moving AI so fast"?

Wasn't 6 released like last week? I can't keep up anymore.

The main issue I have is how they nerf their models and the quality difference between API users and their subscribers.

API price cuts were obvious once they made their announcement changing how usage is counted.

These moves all make sense when you take into account the enterprise market.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49889873

Guys, are we slowing down yet?

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the economics of this business if we hit a wall on peak intelligence but keep finding cool ways to lower prices.

Cache is priced at $0.1/M, 50% as sol 6 and sonnet 5.5.

They need to fix Astra first. My main issue is with GPT in general is that unless steered it goes into building AI “sloppiness”/machinery that is not “needed”.

The good part is that this kind of behaviour also makes it good to find subtle bugs or debug issues that Fable/Claude just cannot get/fix even when you point it.

Weren't there headlines just yesterday that they weren't releasing this due to safety concerns?

regarding the new pro max subscription btw:

it's 500$ for 25x the plus usage, thats pro (max).

this implies that the old 200$ 20x pro (more) is now more like 10x the usage of plus.

they are slashing our subscriptions in half and make it "but we're more efficient!"

It is hard to trust these scores. GPP 6 Sol has been so bad for few days.

Why they are not even benchmark model against Anthropic or anybody ?

Thanks, but I need the money for the next laptop.

OpenAI is cutting their subscription's token value in half. Half. I don't think this is enough to help them compete with Opus 5.5.

noting that input:output:cached is 10:50:1 for astra and luna but 10:50:0.5 for sol. this doesn't mean a lot without "tokens per task" information but it's still interesting for there to be a "dip" like this instead of a monotonic change in one direction or the other

Price wars, those always end well, especially if you are loosing billions per day!

I can appreciate they show that Opus 5.5 is objectively better intel. and cost wise on multiple benchmarks

Is OpenAI’s Cloudflare turnstile new? Never gotten it before.

Either way, a little ironic…

Am I the only one who is struggling to keep up with all these GPT model versions and which one to use and when?

Excited for Gemini 4 at equal or better coding and a fifth of the price of 6.1 Sol

If it's so good why is Dots, also released today, based on Astra?

It's relentless, isn't it?

Still too expensive. Needs to come down to $1 or less to compete with china.

very surprised by the sentiment against GPT 6.0 Sol, I've been using it exclusively since release and it feels like a cheaper astra to me. admittedly I haven't tried any anthropic models in a while other than small tests since i can't use my anthropic subscription in other harnesses (like OpenAI has supported natively for a long time).

If OpenAI cuts alternative harness support it will be a weird day trying to figure out what to do next, it's been so clearly the best bang for your buck (imo) for a while. maybe id finally have to give smaller models a try.

anything to avoid using the dogwater codex & claude code tuis.

anyways this seems like a nice cost improvement over GPT 6 Sol and I expect this will be my new daily driver.

I can blow through my weekly on astra in a few hours; hopefully this really is as good.

Sol is so good, honestly - the sweet spot for me. I've only ever found it stumbles when you don't give enough direction. But for idea execution - Sol is the GOAT.

The only real question that matters at this point is what do the economics look like for OpenAI. If they make good money on this with sane accounting principles then great. If this is just throwing more gasoline on the pile of burning cash to avoid losing more inference business then this bubble can’t pop soon enough.

Sol, Astra.

Eventually: black hole.

the race to the bottom on models is well underway. huge IPO's only really make sense for DC/HW lockups, and going vertical.

Ok when can i get this in codex?

> At the same time, OpenAI is also making its existing $200 Pro plan less appealing. In Codex and Work, $200 Pro subscribers will see their included usage decrease from 20x of what the company offers to Plus users, down to 10x of that same allowance. In ChatGPT, meanwhile, GPT-6 Pro message caps will decrease from 200 to 100 per week.”

Fuck altruism, ammi right? lets make money, gobs of it by screwing the middle users as much as we can to push them into just two tiers: Ones that use it for recreation and others that pay through their noses.

Shots fired, half the price of Opus 5.5.

A night of no sleep this one will be.

Can't trust a company which can halve a subscription any moment they want.

AGI is here

DeepSeek and GLM made it impossible for "sota" to price any way they want.

I’m a bit disappointed with Sol 6.1. I suspect they didn't show the benchmarks and test results because it would have been embarrassing to reveal that their flagship model can't compete with the capabilities of Sonnet 5.5. That said, I still think this model is useful for a great many things, but it looks like Anthropic has the upper hand this time.

$2/10 is pretty cheap for a frontier model...

Aka "we made an oopsie last week and released what should have been called GPT 6 Terra with the name GPT 6 Sol"

Still not available to me

So yesterday we were consumed with how this was being delayed because of safety, yada yada.

Guess not?

I guess they released this because GPT-6 Sol was underwhelming, they didn't even release it to ChatGPT. It was basically GPT-5.6 Terra for the price of Sol. However, who doesn't like price cuts? Astra for the fifth of the price? Wow, OpenAI have been quite generous recently, I still have not forgotten their 90% price cut with GPT-5.6 Luna, and now this? Astra was truly a milestone, and now they are offering similar "intelligence" for cheaper price. Incredible.

One thing I wish was better communicated is the mileage we get for our subscriptions. I do not fully understand how much usage I get with each model and their reasoning effort on 5h and weekly limit in Codex. I am asking because I know switching to Astra would consume my 5h usage limit quite rapidly, so I avoid it. If I knew how much mileage I would get from each model and respective reasoning effort, then I would be able to plan my workflow better and know when to upgrade model for a task. In almost all cases, GPT-6 Luna (XHigh) have been enough. That's why I appreciate its discount, because its dirt cheap, yet highly capable.

In other news:

> In the coming days, we’ll also offer GPT‑6.1 Sol Ultrafast , with up to 8x faster token generation compared to its standard speed in Codex.

Sam Assman needs money to buy a new super car or private jet?

I was wondering why GPT-6 astra has been performing so incredibly bad on codex for the last week. This seems to be a repeating pattern, to dial the settings on the current models to the idiot setting, and then release a new model about a week later.

I wonder if this is the reason GPT barely works now and some chats have become not accessible.

where's the pelican?

Typically how long does codex take to update with the right model metadata for the release of a new model?

{"type":"item.completed","item":{"id":"item_0","type":"error","message":"Model metadata for `gpt-6.1-sol` not found. Defaulting to fallback metadata; this can degrade performance and cause issues."}}

I wish they'd list the environmental cost. My employer has an unlimited AI budget so I don't care about using Astra if it's just more profit for OpenAI. I care more if it actually uses 5x more energy.

GPT 6.0 Sol was so terrible—I wonder if 6.1 Sol will be good?

didn't 6 sol just come out a couple weeks ago?

Came here only to check if the pelican spam has made it to the top again.

GPT-6 Sol released a week ago. Shortest model life ever?

I have used both extensively and I don’t care what the bench marks say - Claude has been way, way better and most importantly, predictable

I can handle issues much better if they are predictable even if the model makes mistakes — much more frustrating when the model is erratic

I find codex wanders off road more often and fails to see the “bigger picture” (as much as LLMs can see the bigger picture at least)

And tbh when it was first released Astral felt even worse

I’m being forced to use it right now and at the end of the day I’m making do so it’s fine, but Claude makes for a smoother experience

I stopped using LLMs. I shit you not. My life got better.

All of a sudden getting competitive on token pricing over the past couple of releases tells me they’re about to kill subscription pricing big time. The subsidised tokens aren’t going to survive the IPOs but if they can capture baseline dev tasks at a cost competitive with open weight models through Luna then capture the frontier token spend as well they could be pretty well placed. The Jarvis bros aren’t going to be able to afford their dashboards though.

Okay, now price cut 6 Sol (and rename it to Terra again).

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If these models are so smart, can't _they_ select the right model for each task?

Let's all boycott and move to Claude until they release 6.1 Astra. I don't like to be teased.

When is the alleged "safety" concern satisfied? Does this mean releasing new capability to consumers is going to get a lot slower? Lower price for 6 Astra capability via this 6.1 Sol is exciting, but that is because of Astra capability not merely the low price point.

When do we get the next jump in capability? When is 6.1 Astra released?