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GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

openrouter.ai

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Re: GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

#231
post #195
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the moment the best place to see them all is to browse the tag on my blog - 140 posts now! https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/ I'm running out of excuses not to build a proper comparison site though. Maybe I'll have Astra do rhat.

FWIW, I had Astra do it as you suggested: https://pelican-model-gallery.alienfluid.chatgpt.site I used Light mode and it used up all my limits for the day and had to continue the following day.

This is great! I can see some of the more abstract ones ending up on the wall at SF-MoMA.

Missing GLM-5.3, though.

Re: GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

#232

I signed up for OpenRouter, loaded it up with $25, and after running a test prompt immediately had my account suspended. There’s no way to talk to support, emails go nowhere, and their Discord is swarmed with people who also are getting no responses to anything. I would recommend staying away from OpenRouter. No matter how good the service is, if anything does go wrong, you have no recourse and you lose every credit…

Are there alternatives that don't slurp in the remaining unused credits every new month? OpenRouter credits carry to the next month up to a year so that's why I use it.

AWS Bedrock is good with billing and customer service, but they don't offer as many models.

Re: GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

#233

I signed up for OpenRouter, loaded it up with $25, and after running a test prompt immediately had my account suspended. There’s no way to talk to support, emails go nowhere, and their Discord is swarmed with people who also are getting no responses to anything. I would recommend staying away from OpenRouter. No matter how good the service is, if anything does go wrong, you have no recourse and you lose every credit…

I did get a response when sending to support@openrouter.ai about a year ago (complaining about some information claims), not about my account.

I emailed them a few days ago and the automated reply says to expect a week for a response. That wouldn’t be concerning except on Discord there are people begging for help after waiting multiple weeks.

Re: GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

#234

The names, I thought they were going to keep Sol, Terra, Luna for a while (while increasing versions). Are names like Sol and Astra really burned as one-offs? I think that's a waste of a good model name. Hope they keep them going with updates, as nicknames for the various model sizes on offer.

Astra is a fourth tier above Sol, analogous to Fable and Opus.

Re: GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That site build cost $24 - extremely non-trivial for a simple frontend. I would say that $24 is trivial IF that's the final design. The truth is that the cost doesn't leave much room for error or experimentation.

> truth is that the cost doesn't leave much room for error or experimentation Compared to what?

A cheap Chinese model, of course.

Re: GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

#236

I tried it with some humanities questions and with the default OR system prompt (no prompt?) it seems to be rather mild - lacking usual AI mannerisms. Kinda cool.

I'm appreciating Astra writes much more humanely somehow than Sol did, and certainly better than the Anthropic models.

It's terse, like all GPT models by default, but the sentences feel less obscurantist.

It's also more pro-active about problem solving.

Re: GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

#237
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be great to spend some money (other people's money) on paying some illustrators and artists to do the same for comparison. It could be straight images converted to SVG or direct vector graphics.

Technically you would pay programmers to write SVG code with no visual feedback if you want a straight 1:1 comparison.

Kinda. It's the difference between measuring the end product vs how it's made.

Re: GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

#238
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Btw, they had 3D pelican-on-the-bicycle easter egg in one of the promo videos: https://youtu.be/bOC3DisEOfg?t=117 so I'm pretty sure that they spent some small amount of resources to train the model to produce good svg version as well. :D

This is one of those benchmarks I don’t mind if they benchmax because it would mean models are actually good at creating svg graphics.

I’m not sure that this follows. And I don’t understand why the pelican bro is not purposefully demonstrating variety of svg tasks to begin with

Re: GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

#239
post #19

I posted this in the other Astra thread but it's just fallen off the homepage, so... Pelicans from Astra, plus 5.6 Sol, Terra, Luna for comparison: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-6-and-5.6-p... I think this is a genuinely interesting comparison grid. Astra may be more expensive, but if you have a budget of 10 cents for a Pelican Astra low gives you something SO much better than the other models. Ast…

It seems to start understanding how bicycles work. Look at the front fork. There are reasons why it's shaped the way it is in real bicycles. If you do physical simulations in 3D with reinforcement learning you will start understanding that most of the arrangements that the other agents use just won't work.

Probably just luck seeing at the wheel intersects the frame and the penguin's legs are caught in the chain.
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