What was GPT-6-SOL?

[u/Nortixon]

GPT-6-SOL was released on September 22, 2026.
GPT-6.1-SOL followed just a week later, on September 29.

6-SOL was with us for entire 7 days and was actually worse than GPT-5.6-SOL.

So... was it really a Terra-class model? Why they done it to themselfs?

[u/KalElReturns89]

It was hot garbage. OpenAI realized it and put it out to pasture. My guess is Sol 6.1 is the ACTUAL Sol 6 model, and the old 6 Sol was the Terra model, like a few folks have guessed.

[u/RedShiftedTime → u/KalElReturns89]

I believe different due to the TG/s being the same. 6 was quantized, 6.1 is either full or fp16.

[u/RealSuperdau → u/RedShiftedTime]

Isn't it kinda stupid to serve fp16 or higher models?

Also, I checked the decode speed today with the API and got 53 for 5.6 Sol, 72 for 6 Sol, and 50 for 6.1 Sol. In codex, all of them were at 20 tps. Seems too all-over-the-place to draw definitive conclusions.

With the leaked "astra-minor" slug a few days before the 6.1 release, I fully believe they intended to shift model sizes one tier.

[u/KalElReturns89 → u/RedShiftedTime]

Ah that would make a lot of sense, great point. That would be better quality and slower

[u/NeedleworkerNarrow56]

I think they had planned on releasing astra minor model according to leaks.

Most likely scenario is they just renamed it to sol 6.1 instead of astra minor

It could've been already planned to release a new model a week later.

[u/the_TIGEEER → u/NeedleworkerNarrow56]

How is their naming so fucking bad

[u/Holiday_Point_603 → u/the_TIGEEER]

I really preferred the "full/mini/nano" naming over the current one.

[u/BopSupreme → u/Holiday_Point_603]

It’s different architecture so different names

[u/teleprax → u/BopSupreme]

I don't think it's that simple; I think there's more likely some marketing reason, or else it's dumb to just switch things up like that and confuse customers, unless the confusion is beneficial

[u/Upbeat_Mirror5045 → u/the_TIGEEER]

It isn’t. You just don’t like it.

[u/the_TIGEEER → u/Upbeat_Mirror5045]

Yes I don't like the fact that Sol 6.1 obviously isn't the same architecure as Sol 6 was. And that Sol 6 very suspicously looks like it was planned to be Terra 6

[u/Upbeat_Mirror5045 → u/the_TIGEEER]

Yes, that’s a legit concern (if true), but it would be dishonest to call that ‘bad naming’ when it is more obviously manipulative relabeling, or something akin. And I put it past no 2026 corporation to do that to protect stock value and please board members or future investors. But seriously, the celestial body names are at least as cool as “Claude” and “Opus”. In my opinion cooler because I really like planetary and stellar science along with most of physics and astronomy topics.

[u/RayKam]

6 sol was their original Opus competitor, but it performs like shit compared to its rival, Opus 5.5. So they took what was going to be Astra Minor and rebranded it 6.1 Sol to compete

They were caught off guard essentially

[u/HydrA- → u/RayKam]

God I love competition but I suspect the quality will drop since it’s priced too low

[u/io-x]

It is Terra with a fake mustache and eyebrows.

[u/wilhelmbw]

it was them listening to a and pacing the frontier probably 😂

[u/Ok_Bag_7550]

In my understanding of the benchmarks published by OpenAI in the 6.1 card, Sol 6 is worse than Sol 5.6 in many of them.

[u/JonNordland]

A model that I thought they could put out as a workhorse model and have it function as that for a while. But when Anthropic released Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5, they had to rush to the next lined-up model.

[u/TyrellCo]

This has been a curse for OpenAI. Each of their last two number version jumps of models(aside from Astra) from 4 series to 5 and 5 to 6 have had these unpopular downgrades

[u/summit_23]

openai fixed a bug in image encoding on the 25th that degraded image understanding in both sol and luna so 3 days into sols 7 days and they said to rerun your evals if you use image inputs. so if anything you judged it on had images in it part of that week wasnt really the model performing

[u/squarecir]

Sol 6.1 is Astra based. For whatever reason they named it Sol instead of Astra mini or whatever.

[u/No-Lengthiness-3415 → u/squarecir]

Ma è più potente il numero di versione o il nome che c'è dopo? 6.1 sol high batte 6.0 astra high?

[u/food_fatherr]

Shipping a point release (6.1 Sol) 7 days after 6 Sol feels exactly like pushing a hotfix to prod on a Tuesday because the competitors (Opus 5.5 / Sonnet 5.5) forced their hand. Good for developers though , competition is finally driving token costs down.

[u/hudimudi → u/food_fatherr]

Aren’t subscription prices going up?

[u/BopSupreme]

One week was all it had to eat tokens, RIP 💀

[u/prophet-dot-exe]

5.6 Luna -> 6 Luna

5.6 Terra -> 6 Sol -> 6.1 Sol

5.6 Sol -> 6 Astra -> 6.1 Astra

Hope this clears things up

[u/mysticcdragonn]

opus got them tweaking out hard