Comment by minimaxir
16 hours ago
Similar 75% price cut trajectory as GPT-5.6 Sol -> GPT-6.1 Sol. Overall, Terra is still half the price of Sol.
But like the original release of Terra, it's still a weird middle child between the small-model-that-got-substantially-better (Luna) and the large-model-that-got-significiantly-cheaper (Sol). The TerminalBench 4.0 cost-per-task results are a bit confusing and I'm not sure why you would pick Terra over Sol in that case. Overall this release seems like a flex on Sonnet 5.5: a model which is having its own middle child problems between the godly Opus 5.5 and the surprisingly capable Haiku 5.5.
the surprisingly capable Haiku 5.5
Destroyed by Anthropics crazy decision to price it x5 after 100k context.
do people really use luna post 100k? small models generally seems to be hallucinating hard for me once you are over that threshold.
On purpose? I was using qwen3.8-27b the other day and very quickly ended up burning through half of the context (it has 128k total) pretty quickly. Not because of my directions, but simply because the codebase was very large.
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Packaging & pricing seem to be two things Anthropic really struggles with
Artificial Analysis still has MiMo 2.6 Pro setting the Pareto frontier where it matters: it's as cheap as Terra High/Sol Low while being smarter than Terra Xhigh. Sol Medium beats MiMo in smarts but is priced a lot higher. Meanwhile Terra Max is dominated by Sol High in both price-per-task and smarts.
You wouldn't believe any of that if you've used MiMo 2.6 Pro. DeepSeek 4.1 flash 1017 is better in actual use in every regard.
I recently tried MiMo 2.6 Pro on a simple app and was positively impressed (modular code with sensible tests). I then tried it on a more difficult problem (which Opus 5.5 solved in minutes) and it looped for 12 hours without making any apparent progress before I finally pulled the plug.
I just imagined reading this comment like 2.5 years ago :)
I don't think software devs are the audience for 6.1 Terra, but instead computer work, automation, and technical writing.
Honestly I'd much rather take this model then.
It is having improvements in other fields than coding while being more cost efficient.
If all I want is coding at a cheaper price, then deepseek is a good model for that.
I am more than okay to have a bifurcation of models good for coding and models good for everything other than coding. I strangely imagined it many years ago.
Everyone is suggesting OpenAI to release a model close to opus 5.5 yet it's releasing this. On one hand we can imagine that maybe their training cycle wasn't able to produce this whereas gpt 6.1 terra was made.
But on the other hand, I also now wish to see an OpenAI model which is good for just pure coding, like an absolute beast at it while being cheap (so the opposite of terra)
ironically, one of the few appreciations that I might give to OpenAI if they pushed this model to prod and are facing some pushback as developers like us want/only see coding models. They could've benchmaxed it and it would've been slightly irrelevant. I'd much rather see reality.
At the very least, this new model won't make things more expensive for anybody and would only make use-cases cheaper depending on what they are, so it's a fine deal for me.
I also wonder maybe this is why open source labs aren't targeting this space and why the only focus of AI labs is coding nowadays. Everything else just doesn't seem so worth it from investor, even end user, training perspective.
Maybe this is the reason why we have gotten almost an exponential growth in coding capabilities as that became the most (if not only) capability that truly really matters.
To not wish for discussion to go to a tangent, nonetheless this could also explain why our work as a software engineer is going through a slight crisis of meaning as these AI models have gotten impressive at coding.
As an (aspiring) developer (currently in 1st year college), I don't wish for AI to replace coding even more for me or to push it even more or to suck the joy out of it even further. So I am more than happy for these models to stay as they are and rather make advancements elseplace. Ironic because it is us developers who use AI as well and we want cheaper workflows and so we would also want models to be cheaper and better at coding. There are some fine lines of contradictions and irony in all of it. I'd much rather also have open-weight models of such terra-like models but I imagine that because of the reasons that I mentioned above, we are most likely gonna see it the most focused on coding but still open-weights is pretty close.
The more choices the better (though choice-fatigue is a real thing), I hope I was able to explain some of the nuance I feel about this particular launch.
Well put.