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GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

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Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#101

Post by cgannett »

jchw wrote: post #60
netsec_burn wrote: post #32

After using Claude for a long time, I tested Sol 5.6 for the first time today. Love it, its an incredibly capable model and uses far fewer tokens/time thinking. Its what I imagine Fable would be if I haven't been downgraded on every conversation - even after completing the verification program. I think I may cancel my Claude subscription finally.

I think Fable's dominance is overstated. It definitely has the lead, but quantifying what that lead actually is is really hard. I'm using GPT 5.6 Sol to do some shit that I personally would consider "crazy" - low level undocumented hardware driver alchemy, reverse engineering highly obfuscated code, even a bit of screwing around with a rendering engine in Vulkan, really just about the most complex tasks I can get any…

And Mai-Code-1.1-Flash seems like a really good cooperative player to GPT 5.6 Sol. You get Sol to help you make a detailed plan, and Mai codes it up and you can get pretty decent code out the other end without too many tokens if you are careful.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#102

Post by iJohnDoe »

sheepscreek wrote: post #59
rpdillon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A billion tokens a day is 11,000 tokens a second sustained. How many tokens per second are you getting off of GPT 5.6 Sol per project?

Ultra mode spins up many sub-agents. On a particularly challenging task, I’ve had as many as 29 agents working at one time. Also if you don’t specify, most end up being the same as the parent model which is pretty wasteful. I engineered a skill that spins up Terra High agents for most sub-agents, resorting to Sol Medium for technical research and Luna High for code/in-project research tasks. On a slightly different t…

Most importantly, are you seeing a return on investment for time and ultimate outcome?

No one can judge the enjoyment, learning, and hobby aspects. Just wondering if there is an end goal for that much overall expenditure (time, money, energy, etc.)

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#103

Post by jaggederest »

paxys wrote: post #86
jaggederest wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a burner and use it? If you're spending $200/mo on something, $40 or whatever for a burner phone seems like a pretty cheap price.

You can get a phone number online for a few dollars.

Historically those are less useful because some of the verification systems require a real phone number and that your name is associated with the account, depending on what and how they verify. It's annoying, I use a google voice number as my primary, and it often gets rejected.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#105

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

kajaktum wrote: post #33
m4rtink wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I ment it as a joke - I agree with you. Watched the Gamers Nexus GPU investigation recently, where they were shown how a chinese soldering shop can transplant GPU chips to a new board, including memory chip reuse. Hopefully we can look forward to all that useless datacenter AI crap gets repurposed in a similar manner into something actually useful for users.

I wouldnt be so hopeful because they dont use commodity hardware afaik How are you going to use a h100 at home?

with the same tricks gamers have always used? Modded drivers, undervolting, etc.?

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#106

Post by saghm »

edg5000 wrote: post #82
jchw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Fable's dominance is overstated. It definitely has the lead, but quantifying what that lead actually is is really hard. I'm using GPT 5.6 Sol to do some shit that I personally would consider "crazy" - low level undocumented hardware driver alchemy, reverse engineering highly obfuscated code, even a bit of screwing around with a rendering engine in Vulkan, really just about the most complex tasks I can get any…

FYI I run it consistently in xhigh regardless of difficulty of the task at hand. I remember high being very fast, but I'd rather wait a bit more and get better output. AIs are insanely fast compared to me anyway, even on xhigh. Consumes more usage, but even at 100 EUR/m I don't hit limits.

After hitting the session limit on my company's plan so many times with Claude when I was using it, I mostly keep Codex on "high" rather than "xhigh" as a way to leave the tokens for my more ambitious coworkers. It's possible that having it higher might end up with better output, but so far at least I've yet to see a way to get any model to do 100% of what I need up front without any need for me to make changes that end up being more tedious to do via interaction than by hand, and it doesn't feel worth spending a bunch more tokens trying to figure out how to better communicate to it up front how the dominoes get set up so they fall in place properly the next time.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#107

Post by dannyw »

ec109685 wrote: post #48
josh-wrale wrote: post #8

Is this motivated by the value of the thinking traces gleaned from the traffic?

They can’t decrypt the thinking traces.

You can train a LLM to inverse summarised thinking into thinking text. It’s not perfect, but it gets you maybe 80% of the quality with proper techniques.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07267

FWIW, there’s not that much value protected here anyway IMHO, and even raw thinking text can lie (as shown by Anthropic’s amazing research), so for legitimate interpretability research it’s limited.

Scaling frontier performance hasn’t been SFT-bounded for a while now; it’s now basically how much you can scale RL rollouts.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#108

Post by vatsachak »

m4rtink wrote: post #17

Price wars did wonders for many businesses, like the bike sharing industry in China. Overgrown datacenters or mounds of GPUs dumped into the harbour next ?

Well one person can use at most one bicycle at a time.

One person can use as many GPUs as they want.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#109

Post by Noaidi »

throwup238 wrote: post #85
IshKebab wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A billion tokens per day?? Plausible estimates put the energy use at about 0.001 Wh/token, which means you're using 1000 kWh/day in electricity, just to generate slop. That's about the same as 50-100 houses. 300kg of CO2 per day - roughly the same as flying from London to New York every three days . I think on average AI energy usage is not as big a deal as everyone is panicking about, but your usage is truly absurd…

You really think OpenAI is selling $1500/mo of electricity (at $0.05/kwh) for $200/mo? I’m guessing that Wh/token estimate is several orders of magnitude too high.

They certainly could be using that much electricity at a loss based on their profitability, which doesn’t exist.

Leaked financial documents from 2025 show the company reported an operating loss of approximately $20.9 billion against $13.1 billion in revenue.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#110

Post by kyxsc »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #99
kyxsc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sol is way too eager to hone in on small details and ends up with massive over-engineering. Fable does it too - to be fair - but noticeably less. After extensively using both on Max 20x plans, I've concluded that Fable is better for problem solving and coding, whereas Sol 5.6 Ultra shines in debugging specific issues: tackle a problem with Fable then leverage Sol to clean up, double check, or fix specific issues. Fab…

Interesting the use of Max and Ultra. I don’t doubt the complexity, but would someone use Max or Ultra on Typescript or Go, for example? Is it more about just avoiding any mistakes? Seems like that would be costly when medium or high would work fine?

*The "Max" I referred to was the plan tier, not the effort level btw

For small tasks, you can just use something like low or medium effort and it can usually avoid mistakes; after all, the model will test the code anyways and can do some baseline level of iterating.

In regards to cost, we need to acknowledge how generous OpenAI was in the last couple months with Codex usage credits (no weekly limits) and usage resets. It afforded me many a dive with Codex! Yes it uses more tokens, but sometimes it's worth it -- just depends on what you're working on.

Finally, Ultra(code) isn't that bad when it comes to cached tokens. I think folks overstate the general token usage of ultra effort on both providers.

---

Both models are great at green-fielding a project when given detailed specs.

Both models overthink too liberally (imo) during these larger multi-shots. Sol overthinks more than Fable.

Both models are really smart and perform great for general knowledge and regular coding tasks.

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