Live data from Hacker News

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

developers.openai.com

11–20 of 352 posts

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

#11

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.…

It reminds me of the seo antics out there. The search results page is the engine, much like how distilling is the "intelligence" for your chinese room machine

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

#13

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

Sun, Earth, Moon — it’s basically L/M/S like you want but a little less boring.

Why is large better than medium to the average end user of ChatGPT though?

I don’t think there’s a way to name these things that will satisfy everyone.

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

#14

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

I think model naming has been atrocious in general, in part because newer "lite" models surpass the capabilities of previous "pro" models (case-in-point: Gemini Flash which now surpasses the capabilities of the latest Gemini Pro, with a newer Flash Lite vying somewhat unsuccessfully for the old Flash price/positioning), but gpt 5.6's Sol/Terra/Luna split is really not bad at all - probably easier to understand than Starbucks' cup sizing!

The problem becomes when you add in the adjustable reasoning efforts and you end up with {model, reasoning_effort} combinations that end up completely obviating particular model classes altogether for at least some percentage of queries; e.g. with GPT 5.6 the price/performance Pareto frontier is dominated by permutations of either Luna and Sol, with Terra nowhere to be seen (but then if you need "large model smells" that aren't captured by your benchmark you can't even rely on this, as a model like Luna simply isn't capable of encoding sufficient world knowledge in its weights to perform certain tasks at any reasoning level but you might be able to get away with Terra on low reasoning, but no one seems to be covering this for some reason).

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

#18

Not for subscribers though

Subscribers already get random rolling resets.

Which is not that great for people using less than 50% every week, because the next reset date moves forward too. In essence, it is redistributing compute from people who haven't used their quota much to those who have.

Though I think they gave a banked reset this time.

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

#19

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.…

[deleted]

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

#20
post #13

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

Sun, Earth, Moon — it’s basically L/M/S like you want but a little less boring. Why is large better than medium to the average end user of ChatGPT though? I don’t think there’s a way to name these things that will satisfy everyone.

The naming schema actually tripped me up for a week or so.

My brain's initial conception of the concepts was earth-relative, so I mapped it as:

Sol = big, it's the sun Luna = medium, in-between sun and earth, space Terra = small, terrestrial

Post reply on HN