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Comment by Tiberium

5 hours ago

I find it extremely strange that they're adding GPT-6 Sol to Chat over GPT-6.1 Sol which is significantly more capable.

I really don't like having to open Work sessions for one-off questions, only because they're limiting what models they put in the chat. The older models are just too dumb for some things.

  • The whole Work/Chat/Codex split is maddening in the way it's implemented. It's a pain to switch back to the right project, it's a pain to switch forward, it's a pain to try to remember which chat was in what.

6.1 is Astra minor. Way more capable but also way heavier+slower. Its really 2 different models, they just shipped it as sol to recover from the gpt6 disaster lunch, where they tried to pass terra 6(or a cheaper model) as sol but it was worse than expected

  • Anecdotally this is what I experienced, do you have sources for this?

    • It's purely circumstantial, but 6 Sol supports no reasoning (same as 6 Luna and 5.6 Sol/Luna), while both Astra and 6.1 Sol do not support "reasoning = none".

I’ve hit model not available limits for GPT 6.1 Sol multiple times over the last week. It’s never for very long, and I can switch to Astra, but it seems like OpenAI is struggling with capacity. This has happened with my personal $200 Pro connection and my Codex enterprise connection.

  • I had a codex session stop in the middle because the auto-reviewer timed out with something like "auto-review not available at the moment". The capacity issues are very clearly observable since gpt6-astra launched.

gpt-6.1-sol was released 7 days after gpt-6-sol only because they were bleeding to fable-5.1/opus-5.5 from Anthropic. It was a desperation move and certainly ate into their margins massively. Since their margins on gpt-6.1-sol are much slimmer than on gpt-6-sol they have to use it somehow to preserve compute and make profit. Frankly I think OpenAI is a mess and is playing catch-up with Anthropic… I don’t know how they will recover.

Given the extreme short time between 6 Sol and 6.1 Sol, I suspect they don’t actually have much in common and 6.1 is a heavier model rebranded as Sol in a panic response to poor agentic capabilities of 6.

  • I suspect that 6 sol was a better version of 5.6 terra (and note that in the 6 sol and luna release, they took out terra, and price 6 sol at 5.6 terra pricing), then the backlash from lesser capabilities made them roll out 6.1 sol as the actual 5.6 sol - size modee.