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

1066 points · 953 comments · crorella

  1. the_duke · · focus · HN ↗
    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)

    1. stldev · · focus · HN ↗
      My experience as well.

      For coding specifically, I've found 5.6-Sol > 6.0 Sol > Astra.

      For modeling and artwork, Astra has been great routinely outperforming Kimi.

      This is reminiscent to me of what Anthropic pulled back in February with their adaptive thinking rollout.

      I can't wait for technology to catch up to a point where we can rid ourselves of this oligopoly.

      1. rrvsh · · focus · HN ↗
        Hard agree

        I had to switch back to 5.6 Sol after trialling 6 Sol for like 3 days - I was getting insanely annoyed at how misaligned it is. Will try 6.1 but not very high hopes

      2. keyle · · focus · HN ↗
        I'd even go one more, 5.4 was great until 5.5, which was a rug pull.

        I&#x27;ll just leave this here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginlab.ai&#x2F;trackers&#x2F;codex&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginlab.ai&#x2F;trackers&#x2F;codex&#x2F;

      3. dannyw · · focus · HN ↗
        Adaptive thinking was a good idea though. The old method of manually specifying how many thinking tokens you wanted as budget was just silly. The rollout might not have been great, but the change is good.

        And, is it really even an oligopoly anymore? Open weight models are incredibly competitive in every way; whether you want to use US providers, Chinese official providers, self host, etc.

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