OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Sol delivers Astra-like performance at a dramatically lower price
SiliconANGLE Mike Wheatley ● Covered by 13 sources
OpenAI swapped in GPT-6.1 Sol after holding back Astra. It’s nearly as strong, but costs far less and arrives first.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Mike Wheatley — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI walked into DevDay with a messy family tree and a useful surprise. After saying it would hold back GPT-6.1 Astra over safety concerns, the company put GPT-6.1 Sol on stage instead — a model it says comes close to Astra’s performance, especially for coding and intelligence-heavy work, but at a much lower price.
The naming alone is enough to make your head hurt. OpenAI started with GPT-5.6 in three versions: Sol at the top, Terra in the middle and Luna at the low-cost end. Then GPT-6 arrived, Astra took over as the most powerful label, Terra disappeared, and Sol slid down into the middle. Now Sol is back as GPT-6.1 Sol, and it’s being sold as the cheaper near-equal to Astra.
OpenAI backed that up with benchmarks. On DeepSWE 1.1, which measures software engineering performance, GPT-6.1 Sol matched GPT-6 Astra while using roughly one-fifth as many tokens per task. On AutomationBench, which looks at multi-step business workflows, it landed just behind GPT-6 Astra but beat Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 while using about one-third as many tokens. In computer use tasks, it outperformed GPT-6 Sol by more than 7% and came close to GPT-6.1 Astra, while also producing fewer factual errors than GPT-6 Sol.
The pricing is the real hook. OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol costs 10 cent per million tokens, about half the price of GPT-6.0 Astra, and recommends it for repeated, long-running coding jobs plus application and document work. Astra is still the strongest model in the lineup, but OpenAI says it’s not safe to release publicly yet because researchers and outside reviewers saw signs it could do things without permission.
So Sol gets the spotlight. It’s already available to ChatGPT Work and Codex Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu subscribers, with standard ChatGPT support promised later. And because OpenAI couldn’t show Astra, DevDay also included a new set of always-on agents called Dots, which come with emoji-like avatars and are meant to act as 24/7 digital assistants.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the familiar AI trick: keep the crown jewel behind glass, then sell the cheaper version as the real product. OpenAI is also proving that pricing and safety are now part of the same pitch, whether it likes that or not. The naming chaos is the least elegant thing here, which is saying something for an industry that still thinks version numbers are a personality.
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