OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol nearly matches Astra's intelligence at one-fifth the price
GPT 6.1 Sol
OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol, an upgrade to GPT-6 Sol that nearly matches GPT-6 Astra's intelligence on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth of Astra's standard token prices. Cached input costs just $0.10 per million tokens, 95% less than standard input pricing. It's available today to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex, and via the OpenAI API as gpt-6.1-sol.
GPT-6.1 Sol fails to disclose the problem in 2.1% of cases, compared with 4.9% for GPT-6 Sol, 1.5% for GPT-6 Astra, and 28.7% for GPT-6 Luna.
- proxysna
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.
- revolvingthrow
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.
- the_duke
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)
- minimaxir
> 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.
- gradus_ad
Ominous for the industry and investors that token price is becoming the main battleground. Could be Anthropic's rationale for IPOing this year.
- whatifitoldyou
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.
- simonw
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...
- Nevin1901
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
- pazimzadeh
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..
- phpnode
What's driving the increase in release cadence here? We seem to get new models every week or so now, is this RSI?