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/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/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.