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OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

tosh

Comments (270)

  • eigenspace
    The fact that AI models can be so easily distilled and replicated is such a stroke of luck.10 or 15 years ago if one had asked me to envision a future where a private company invents artificial intelligence, I'd have thought for sure they'd have a massive moat, be very difficult to catch, and it would create an almost instant monopoly.Rather, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom.Who woulda thought that just having access to enough textual inputs and outputs and a vaugely similar transformer architecture would be enough to copy-cat rather useful intelligence.
  • ComputerGuru
    It's a 20% discount on input and a 33% discount on output through at least November 21, 2026; the revised pricing schedule is now Model Input Cached input Cache writes Output gpt-5.6-sol $4.00 $0.40 $5.00 $20.00 gpt-5.6-terra $2.00 $0.20 $2.50 $12.00 gpt-5.6-luna $0.20 $0.02 $0.25 $1.20 So Sol is still 20x Luna, but much more appealing when compared to offerings from Anthropic and others.
  • m101
    These are my opinions on which circumstances Sol fails terribly vs Fable.I am the type of coder that vibe codes - I talk to the agent about a problem, have it write a plan, red team the plan, and then implement the plan. These projects are things which haven’t really been done before, or if they have it’s not public or not in many places.What I find is that Sol is hyper-left brained. Super focused on small details. When given a longer task with multiple steps it might go really hard on one of the early steps and it will validate, test, make safe, so much to the detriment of progressing the task within reasonable parameters for the project.It also starts to sound crazy when you ask it for an update. It starts naming things in weird ways and the sentences don’t really make sense. It’s as if you’ve approached an engineer who has been hammering on something and he speaks to you in the lingo of his latest function, even though when you ask him for a status you are obviously asking about the whole project.Fable on the other hand seems to remain coherent over time. It’s as if it remains aware of the longer run task. It’s got a bit more balance between left and right brain.So OpenAI really need to find a balance between long term goal thinking and the very small task at hand.For coders who apply Sol on specific functions or narrow tasks I’m a certain it is great. For me, a vibe coder, I need one that will be a bit more aware of the whole thing through these longer running tasks.
  • sandle
    Absolutely loving this price war, long live open source models.
  • AM1010101
    50% off at open router is also still applied so it comes out at $2 / $10 per 1M.Feature request for Artificial Analysis, allow us to see these live prices on the pareto. It would amazing to also see what a 25,50,75,100 % utilised subscription costs compared to raw tokens.
  • ninjahawk1
    Once they make a model better than Fable I’ll be switching to Codex. Their priorities in terms of consumers seem to be better. I do think Anthropic has some solid safety viewpoints, but I don’t necessarily think that either is entirely aligned yet with delivering exactly what humanity needs. Maybe the AI will help align the AI companies when it gets smart enough. That’s the real misalignment I’m concerned about.
  • artrockalter
    This stacks with the 50% discount in OpenRouter, making it $2/$10. https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-sol
  • blobbers
    The top comment on this thread was about AI models being easily distilled being a stroke of luck.This should not be surprising at all. Every new students spends tiny fractions of time learning knowledge that took many lifetimes to discover. This fundamental to the progress of intelligence and understanding.It should not be surprising that AI can be distilled. It's the logical method of training; I would hope that each frontier model is in fact not trained 'from scratch' each time.We should expect future frontier models are simply distilled versions trained by specialist models, the same way humans learn from a series of professors, papers and canonical books on each different subject material. Models like this can be trained incrementally, or a so called Mixture of Experts (MoE).
  • badatnames
    Using codex every day, in spite of which, I hope some day providers will just start naming their offerings small/medium/large, a bit like we eventually started doing in software testing. Trying to remember what Sol is or why it's better than the other thing is more cognitive effort than I can muster at this point. And that's a sure sign of commoditisation in itself
  • simonw
    The "until at least Nov 21st" thing presumably mainly affects teams that pin to GPT-5.6 Sol (maybe after extensive testing) such that they won't be switching to GPT-5.7 or GPT-6 or whatever new model is released between now and November.
  • c0rruptbytes
    Sol is closer to Fable than Opus - I like SlopCodeBench the most as a test - https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-f...You add requirements and make previous tests invisible to see how pigeon brained the model is - Sol and Fable seem to rank the same as Opus tends to fall behind
  • nahnahno
    My prediction is that this becomes permanent. There is no good reason to be much more expensive than opus. At $4/$20 they are roughly at parity.Making 2/10 permanent would be a killer move and make a strong argument against open-weight. For the sake of the open weight ecosystem I hope they do not.
  • Alifatisk
    Bummer, this does not affect the weekly usage on Codex through Subscription.
  • rootusrootus
    Good timing. I'm not too happy having to pay MAX pricing to even access Fable, and I've had a couple situations where Fable missed things and GPT 5.6-Sol caught it. My needs are modest and I can get by on a $20 OpenAI subscription, so the odds are starting to look increasingly like I'm going to drop Anthropic altogether.
  • m4rtink
    Let the race to the bottom - and beyond - begin!
  • Ringz
    The price difference to Deepseek models (deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp) is still significant while the performance difference is not.
  • victor9000
    What good does a temporary price reduction do for production workloads? I'm not even running evals on something that is not long-term sustainable.
  • prtmnth
    Through OpenRouter you can get Sol for $2 input / $10 output which makes it a really attractive choice amongst frontier models.
  • xfax
    Your move, Anthropic
  • throwaway2027
    I think this is a move to get people off the subscription and move to API. The weekly usage is still awful altough it seems they're trying to fix it but I'm not hopeful.
  • colinsane
    the fastest, most compliant model remains the cheapest. you could discount Sol to the same price as Luna and i would still prefer Luna for 90%+ of tasks. once you hit this baseline capability, speed and predictability dominate for anything i'd throw these at in production.
  • bronlund
    It's going to be like gas. Token prices are going to change multiple times a day.
  • NietTim
    These price drops are absolutely bonkers. Gotta love competition! Glad we didn't end up with a duopoly of openai and anthropic, we got a glimpse of what nightmare that would've been and it wasn't pretty
  • yomismoaqui
    Thanks to both China & capitalism
  • trizoza
    If it's on sale, it can't be that good.
  • VulgarExigency
    Maybe it's because I don't use it in Codex, but I don't like working with Sol. It CONSTANTLY omits things it shouldn't, and is always dispatching sub-agents to do what I tell it to do, that don't have all the necessary context, and so they go on and do the research that was already done by the top-level agent. It's maddening.I tried it again today because of the discount, it told me it couldn't run acceptance tests because a .env file did not exist, and when I showed it the damn file it went "ah, it's there now". I think it was the first time I've ever had an agent try to gaslight me.
  • epsteingpt
    They're really trying to tank Anthropic's IPO huh?
  • ex1fm3ta
    The Chinese are coming after these greedy-ass frontier labs. Today Xiaomi unveiled it's own inference machine .... I bet it's gonna be cheaper than Nvidia DGX, shipped with open source models that anybody can have at home.
  • wahnfrieden
    Not for subscribers though
  • kylepomykala
    Very exciting - if only anthropic would do the same.
  • kosolam
    Does it mean that subscriptions get more tokens? I’m testing it now for coding instead of claude and it’s very important to understand if I get more due to the price reduction.
  • ChrisArchitect
  • Culonavirus
    Ed is gonna have a field day with this lol.
  • dominotw
    then what happens?they discovered a great way to destroy their own stickyness and make ppl build generic ai solutions.
  • Makson179
    [dead]