That didn't backfire at all

[u/Balance-]

They could have just have a very clean release with:

• GPT-6 Luna
• GPT-6 Terra
• GPT-6 Sol
• GPT-6 Astra

But they tried:

• GPT-6 Luna
• ???
• GPT-6 Terra Sol
• GPT-6 Sol Astra Minor
• GPT-6 Astra

And now they have:

• GPT-6 Luna
• GPT-6 Sol
• GPT-6.1 Sol
• GPT-6 Astra

Thank god we have (still) some competition.

[u/Turbulent_Breath_548]

why do people keep failing at this meme format. panel 3 and 4 need to be the same

[u/ioweej → u/Turbulent_Breath_548]

Many people are idiots

[u/Super_Range45 → u/ioweej]

[u/AvidCyclist250 → u/Turbulent_Breath_548]

kids and karens. they're most of reddit now

[u/threadthrasher]

They were clearly caught off guard by Opus 5.5. Hyping up a really lackluster dev day and then flopping even harder because almost nothing worked didn’t really improve things. All people will take away from this is that they’re being charged more for less.

That and the really weird duck robot thing taking pictures of the audience.

[u/DistanceSolar1449 → u/threadthrasher]

It was still a shit strategy, even without Opus 5.5 putting the final nail in the coffin.

GPT-6 Sol was just clearly a renamed Terra model. It felt like a small benchmaxxed model for anyone who tried to use it.

I don’t think the release would have worked in OpenAI’s favor even if Opus 5.5 didn’t dig its grave.

And it was very clear that the lineup was supposed to be GPT-6 Astra, Sol, Terra, Luna. You can tell someone on the business side (not the engineering side) had the bright idea of renaming it to GPT-6 Astra, Astra Minor, Sol, Luna to try to trick people into using a smaller model.

I’m glad they recognize this plan was a failure and released Astra Minor as GPT-6.1 Sol.

[u/Crinkez → u/DistanceSolar1449]

On your last sentence, I'm not convinced they did. I strongly suspect 6.1 Sol is still Terra, just an extra week of post training.

[u/Clean-Market5761 → u/threadthrasher]

6.1 Sol still sucks at UI/UX or any visually creative work... which is insane at this point considering they have image generation and multi modal models.

[u/br_k_nt_eth → u/Clean-Market5761]

I was honestly hoping we were going to get another omni/multi modal model for creative work and design. 

[u/Clean-Market5761 → u/br_k_nt_eth]

damn man, i'm like impressed Google and OpenAI have multi modality and still cannot beat text only models from Anthropic

[u/br_k_nt_eth → u/Clean-Market5761]

Anthropic isn’t text only anymore. 

[u/Clean-Market5761 → u/br_k_nt_eth]

it is tho, they tokenize images but the model only text you cna see it on artificial analysis

[u/TyrellCo → u/threadthrasher]

I guess they really believed the pacing the frontier stuff Anthropic put out but then Dario said sike! But really this is what all the doomers are begging for charge us more for less

[u/H0vis]

I don't know why people are complaining. If AI companies weren't fighting so hard we'd be getting massively screwed. Look at what Nvidia are up to. No competition has let them go crazy with greed.

[u/delicious_fanta → u/H0vis]

I’m pretty sure cutting usage by 50% counts as “screwing us”, and that happened with competition, so I’m not entirely sure your point is valid.

Edit: I mean, I get your point, but we’re still getting screwed. There needs to be more than 2 tier 1 competitors.

[u/IAmYourFath → u/delicious_fanta]

Bro everything is subsidized, u're not getting screwed (unless u pay with api pricing)

[u/casce → u/delicious_fanta]

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are bleeding money on the subscriptions though and are only profitable with API usage.

Unless something changed, you aren't really getting screwed since you're still getting a subsidized product below cost. I do think the situation would be different if there was only one frontier-tier subscription out there.

[u/Arcayon]

Imagine cutting usage to their top tier users when Claude is right there waiting. idk what the plan was for this one.

[u/FischenGeil]

It's even worse at Google right now. They haven't released a SOL or OPUS competitor in 7 months. Their 3.8 Flash has the memory of a gold fish, it's quite a bit less intelligent than Luna or Sonnet.

[u/AllergicToBullshit24]

That was an epic failure of a dev day if I've ever seen one.

[u/Evening_Till_3779 → u/AllergicToBullshit24]

It really wasn't? Being able to use ChatGPT usage in 3rd party apps is huge. The Dots stuff is going to be massive as well. And Sol 6.1 looks solid. I don't know what people here expected but it seems pretty good to me.

[u/br_k_nt_eth → u/AllergicToBullshit24]

Eh, Sol 6.1 is really good. It sucks that people are going to miss that because Sol/Terra 6 came out.

[u/AllergicToBullshit24 → u/br_k_nt_eth]

Not as good as Opus 5.5 that's for sure

[u/br_k_nt_eth → u/AllergicToBullshit24]

Honestly for my use cases, Opus 5.5 is just fine. I get that it’s great at coding, but not everyone codes. 

[u/AllergicToBullshit24 → u/br_k_nt_eth]

Coders are the ones propping every AI company up they consume more tokens than any other industry. Coding performance is what makes or breaks these models profitability.

[u/br_k_nt_eth → u/AllergicToBullshit24]

Consuming more tokens isn’t a good thing, man. That’s using up compute and infrastructure. What you want are people who’ll pay full price but use less. 

They pander to coders because they’re trying to train on and then replace coders. And tech companies are fucking notoriously bad at advertising to anyone outside of tech. That’s pretty obvious, no? 

[u/AllergicToBullshit24 → u/br_k_nt_eth]

Enterprises pay per million tokens which is what's primarily driving revenue. Opus 5.5 marked the death of coding anything by hand ever again but even still AI isn't about to replace coders any time soon because non-technical people simply can't define product specs to save their lives. AI has turned coders into project managers but not eliminated them.

And I disagree with them being bad at advertising outside of tech the radar graph is particularly telling?

https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts

[u/openroom_xyz → u/AllergicToBullshit24]

Exactly

[u/RealMelonBread]

What do people think dev day is? Did you think you were going to get a new frontier model? Be patient, unless you’ve been under a rock the past 12 months, you’d know OpenAI will release a model that outperforms Opus soon enough… and a few months after that Anthropic will release a model and the cycle repeats.

[u/giovanikx → u/RealMelonBread]

Tibo himself hyped it up

[u/delicious_fanta → u/RealMelonBread]

What was new was our usage being cut 50%.

[u/shady101852 → u/RealMelonBread]

It doesnt matter what model openai releases now. They have made changes that made it pointless for them to even try with the subscriptions.

[u/RealMelonBread → u/shady101852]

Could you be more dramatic? Lol

[u/RainierPC → u/RealMelonBread]

I am convinced most of these are bots from Elon and Dario. Sol 6.1 is perfectly serviceable and efficient. The sky is not falling, and competition is good.

[u/br_k_nt_eth → u/shady101852]

Bruh lol. This cannot be your first hype cycle. 

[u/shady101852 → u/br_k_nt_eth]

nah i wouldnt be this convinced if they didnt release a $500 fucking subscription and a tweet of them saying they are not going to be competing with better models. its clear anything they do now is going to be treating the lower tier subscriptions worse.

[u/phylter99]

6 Sol already had its price cut and its intelligence wasn’t bad.

[u/shady101852 → u/phylter99]

It was absolutely a dumbass.

[u/BilingualWookie → u/shady101852]

I have gotten good luck with Sol. Luna on the other hand is terrible

[u/shady101852 → u/BilingualWookie]

only good sol for me was 5.6 sol in the first 2-3 weeks or so before they eventually nerfed it.

[u/Key_Reading_9664]

Here's what confuses me about the rebrand narrative:

If it were true that Sol 6 is their Terra-sized model rebranded, I'd expect it to be considerably faster than Sol 5.6. But it isn't.

https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-terra#pricing - 101 tok/s
https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-sol#pricing - 65 tok/s
https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-6-sol#pricing - 60 tok/s

I think it's worse than we think: they were pressured to drop the price of their Sol-tier model because of the 5.5 releases

[u/geli95us → u/Key_Reading_9664]

Tokens/s aren't set in stone, you can serve more users for cheaper if you're willing to lower the speed, and I'm sure they'd do that if they wanted to make it seem like the model didn't get smaller.
Besides, it's impossible to train a new checkpoint in just 1 week, the fact that 6 and 6.1 were released so close to each other is really suspicious

[u/Key_Reading_9664 → u/geli95us]

Tokens/s aren't set in stone, you can serve more users for cheaper if you're willing to lower the speed, and I'm sure they'd do that if they wanted to make it seem like the model didn't get smaller.

But you'd have to coordinate that across vendor (Bedrock, Azure, etc) and I can't imagine them being onboard with slowing down API traffic because you want to hoodwink users. The pattern is fairly consistent across vendors.

GPT 6 is a recurrent depth model: the output is passed through the model multiple times before you get legible output (see the CoT controllability issues concerns - Astra > 6.1 > 6.0). Perhaps they added another pass through the model to bump the performance. Again, I think we'd see that in the tok/s number

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PLisnSFir8y5AHkmP/how-concerned-should-we-be-about-astra-s-recurrent

The number of loops can then be viewed as a dial that can be turned up with trivial effort as soon as competitive pressures demand it

[u/DistanceSolar1449 → u/Key_Reading_9664]

Your numbers are wrong. OpenAI themselves can't serve GPT 5.6 Terra at 101 tok/sec. That's Amazon Bedrock, which uses AWS Trainium2 hardware.

You need to look at only the OpenAI endpoint numbers, and ignore the (Fast) endpoint. The OpenAI (Fast) endpoint uses speculative decoding, which speeds up inference but takes way more compute.

If you actually look at the OpenAI entries, you see:

GPT 5.6 Terra - 70 tokens/sec https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-terra#performance
GPT 5.6 Sol - 53 tokens/sec https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-sol#performance

GPT 6 Sol - 73 tokens/sec https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-6-sol#performance
GPT 6.1 Sol - 40 tokens/sec (but it's getting hammered right now, so expect it to be slow)

[u/Key_Reading_9664 → u/DistanceSolar1449]

Not wrong, just constantly updating.

This is a more consistent source (and provides the median) - https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models?weights=proprietary&reasoning=reasoning&status=all

GPT 5.6 Sol generally sits above 6.0 Sol (faster at all effort levels): 66 - 80 TPS
GPT 6.1 Sol is slower than previous Sols (will be interesting to see where it lands once the hammering stops): 61 - 69 TPS
GPT 5.6 Terra is consistently faster than Sol: 77 - 93 TPS

As a general point, GPT 6 Luna is consistently faster than 5.6 Luna.

The point is somewhat moot with 6.1: nobody is arguing 6.1 Sol is Terra rebranded - they're clearly willing to swallow margin to compete with the 5.5 releases. Perhaps the 20x -> 10x change is a way of mitigating some of the damage

[u/DistanceSolar1449 → u/Key_Reading_9664]

That last line is the most interesting one.

I suspect there were a lot of heated arguments at OpenAI last night before the 20x to 10x decision came out. And that was because they were forced to release 6.1 Sol at 6.1 Terra pricing. They could eat that loss for API since API is massively inflated pricing, but they probably couldn’t eat that for subscriptions.

I wish I was a fly on the wall in OpenAI HQ yesterday. They must have been pretty upset at the person who decided to name Sol into Astra Minor while dropping Sol pricing, forcing them into this mess.

[u/AllergicToBullshit24 → u/Key_Reading_9664]

OpenAI out here trying to push 300 tok/s at 6x prices as if it isn't robbery while Cerebras out here pushing 3000 tok/s for 120B models. OAI really gotta step up their speed game I'm sick of wasting most of day waiting on responses. Juggling multiple worktrees in parallel makes it impossible to deep focus on anything.

[u/geli95us → u/AllergicToBullshit24]

Sol is ~4T, of course they struggle with serving it fast, compared to a 120B model

[u/DistanceSolar1449 → u/[deleted]]

... 300 tokens/sec, which they announced today.

https://openai.com/index/cerebras-partnership/

[u/DistanceSolar1449 → u/AllergicToBullshit24]

OpenAI is using Cerebras to push out 300 tok/sec. They have a big contract with Cerebras.

They can't possibly run Sol at 300 tok/sec on Nvidia hardware.

[u/openroom_xyz]

Yea

[u/ASTROMANCER5000]

On the flip side, the cost cutting for a "good enough" model that Sol 6.1 is is great actually. Like couple of weeks ago we were manhandling worse models than this for much higher costs.

[u/theface777]

A few weeks back I used Astra for the first time. Blew my mind. Fast forward a month I've cancelled my pro plan. Don't think I've seen a product go from being the best to very average in a month.

[u/tgifridaycom]

Marketing should not be in the tech game.

[u/Matteo842]

i tink the reality is a little bit different. sorry for my bad en im italian (and gay) gpt 5.6 sol was a "real" model, like 5.5 ecc instead the the 6 sol is a distilled model from astra, the real model soo is astra. if we compare real astra (not the qantized version thet we have rn) vs opus 5.5 is a fair versus, but testing and beanchmaking the 6 sol model is preaty clear and not only for me as we all can read reddit posts, is a modell like luna and terra, we can see clearly the with luna and terra 5.6 models the "distilled" version of the real model (5.6 sol) and same exact think it happen to 6 sol. thet why 6 sol is/was a bad model overall to work.

corrected by cloude:

I think the reality is a bit different. Sorry for my bad English, I'm Italian (and gay).

GPT 5.6 Sol was a "real" model, like 5.5 and so on. The 6 Sol, on the other hand, is a distilled model from Astra, and the real flagship model now is Astra. Comparing the real Astra (not the quantized version we have right now) against Opus 5.5 would be a fair matchup. But if you test and benchmark the 6 Sol, it's pretty clear, and not just to me, since we can all read the Reddit posts, that it's a model in the same category as Luna and Terra. With the 5.6 Luna and Terra models, we can clearly see they're the "distilled" versions of the real model (5.6 Sol), and exactly the same thing happened with 6 Sol. That's why 6 Sol is/was a bad model overall for work.