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

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• Hacker News
• 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
  by NietTim
• 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.

  by nahnahno
• I'm guessing they do this to help move people off old models they want to depreciate. It's not a price hike for old models, it's them removing a discount!
  by sauwan
• Isn't it essentially permanent since a new model will be out by then?
  by ayargz
• Sol is much cheaper than opus because it uses less tokens. Never compare token pricing.
  by redox99
• 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.
  by rootusrootus
• There is no model that is never going to miss something.
  by dbbk
• 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
  by badatnames
• 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).

  by ComputerGuru
• Tinfoil hat time: They saw everyone referring to Mythos, and later Fable, as the new “good” models when Anthropic released those, distinguishable from the “regular” Claude (or other companies’ models) for everyone, and didn’t have that distinction for the GPT model family. That’s why the planetary names were introduced.
  by msdz
• 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.

  by phoghed
• 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).

  by blobbers
• Why not reply to that top comment? Its still there.
  by tomasphan
• > This should not be surprising at all. Every new students spends tiny fractions of time learning knowledge that took many lifetimes to discover.

  This argument is exactly why we should not anthropomorphise models.

  You are comparing the way a human brain learn with training a statistical model. You can't just "this is like learning so don't be surprised".

  It takes a child one minute to learn how to open a padlock. Teach that to a robot with your analogies.

  by emil-lp
• This stacks with the 50% discount in OpenRouter, making it $2/$10. https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-sol
  by artrockalter
• 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.
  by ninjahawk1
• You are basically saying you will switch from one evil to another because the other seems less evil for now.

  It's funny how people make these alignment comments while ignoring how misaligned the leadership at these companies are right form the get go and they just play mental gymnastics to deflect those facts when confronted with them.

  by sleepgummies
• Fable 5 is just straight up a larger model - I'm guessing at this, but there is plenty of evidence online from people far more plugged in than I am. OpenAI is pursuing a strategy that yields greater operating margins and penetration of their model to developers. Fable's high cost makes it so premium that Anthropic has to reserve it for only the richest customers and corporate users. That's not a winning formula long term.

  I believe the reason we have not seen a Fable-level model from OpenAI yet is because doing so would box them in on costs just as harshly as it has boxed in Anthropic. They are letting Anthropic make this mistake.

  by ttul
• I don't think these companies have humanity's needs in mind when they're developing these models. Although the last part of your comment struck me as a bit comical, I genuinely believe that an AI can have way more empathy than a corporation. Afterall, a mimicry of empathy is probably better than no empathy.
  by alternatex
• It feels like 5.6-Sol is already fairly close to Fable, and in some ways exceeds it. Just the other day I had Fable draw up a solution for me, and then I fed it into 5.6-Sol and said how does this look ... it found an oversight and told me about it, and when I then fed that observation back into Claude it acknowledged the miss.

  I've noticed also that 5.6-Sol is more concise with output than Fable (and let's not talk about Opus, which is even more wordy).

  by rootusrootus
• 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.

  by AM1010101
• 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.

  by m101
• FWIW Seeing the same thing with Opus 5. Not sure if the models are being over optimized for agentic tasks or over reliance on synthetic data, because since Opus 4.6 I feel like emotional/conversational intelligence has been on a decline (Fable being the exception)
  by dimitri-vs
• Absolutely loving this price war, long live open source models.
  by sandle
• > long live open source models

  There are no open source models, at least not useful ones (yet) [0]. Open weight is not the same as open source. The current "open weight" models are just opaque binary blobs you can run on your own computer instead of through a web API.

  [0] https://allenai.org/

  by petcat
• 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.
  by ComputerGuru
• It feels like a slightly more palatable version of what Anthropic has been doing, with their constant "use your free tokens before they expire next week!" campaigns. But it's feeling more and more ominous now, like they've hit the top of the demand curve and need to pull back prices to continue growing.
  by CodingJeebus
• 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.

  by eigenspace
• The internet created lots of monopolies with network effects and economies of scale.a low margin commoditized business that still attracted a trillion dollars of investment to get off the ground was not how I envisioned it happening either.
  by lerchmo
• Where is the actual evidence of distillation? I keep seeing this repeated ad nauseam but I must have somehow missed the evidence.
  by colingauvin