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  • Hacker News
  • The higher price seems less important if it actually gets the job done with fewer tokens. I'm still very worried that this will end up coming back to bite us, by becoming more expensive once they inevitably nerf it. Every major model provider does that now after all
    by 1saadcodes
  • 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.
    by kzrdude
  • Astra is a fourth tier above Sol, analogous to Fable and Opus.
    by kdnvk
  • This feels like a genuine step change in AI development. Inline with Dec 2025 release of Opus 4.6.

    Where do we go from here??

    by theagenticleade
  • Faster; cheaper.
    by sejje
  • 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.
    by killerstorm
  • 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.

    by cmrdporcupine
  • Just got access to it on Plus plan in Australia. 2 Banked resets as well.
    by sumedh
  • in the middel of a coding session with 5.6 sol. astra popped up, swapped, asked review, it fixed a few really critical bugs immediately. pretty nice. one around some resource lifetimes in a rendering pipeline which would have been a nightmare to find manually.

    almost had the feelin it was watching its little brother fail and had to 'step in' for a moment :').

    time to go play outside...

    by saidnooneever
  • Its also available finally to Pro users! Just took 24 hours.
    by kingstnap
  • Meanwhile Fable with it's restrictions is still only available on 100 USD plan upwards.
    by cromka
  • They gave out bankable resets for every day people on pro plans didn't get Astra. Given that, I wish they'd waited a few more days before activating it on my account :-D
    by InsideOutSanta
  • $10/$50 is incredibly expensive compared to Chinese models which are cents.

    I think they’re really going to struggle selling these models long-term. My company is already massively cutting down on access because they’ve realised most people don’t actually produce any value using it. All the tokenmaxers have ruined it for the rest of us now that accounting have seen the costs.

    by MisterMunchkin
  • the only thing that matters is cost per task. Astra seems to be massively efficient.
    by KptMarchewa
  • Not really comparable IMO. Astra and Fable are not the every day workhorse you reach for to do basic tasks (unless your company has fuck you-money), they’re the tool you break out when you need the absolute strongest performance. There are plenty of tasks where finding and fixing one or two extra edge cases saves the business a lot of money, even if the cost is high. The best example would be scanning for vulnerabilities, if these models weren’t kneecapped in that area.
    by gentlewater
  • My company literally mandated tokenmaxxing while all the engineers told them this was a bad idea.
    by wookmaster
  • It's like saying you're not paying for senior level engineers because you can get juniors for quarter the price per hour.
    by kolinko
  • That's some crazy SVG generation:

    https://aibenchy.com/compare/openai-gpt-6-astra-high/google-...

    It took a while to test it, initially OpenRouter was giving Not Found errors for this model ID.

    by XCSme
  • >AGI

    >Playing ping pong from the side of the table

    I think marketing might be getting a bit absurd at this point

    by viccis
  • The Astra one looks pretty good except it's standing on the wrong side of the table
    by readams
  • At the bottom it says "Score 98.58", what measure is used for this score? It's kind of horrible, the perspective is all off (legs of the table makes that very obvious), the mouse/hamster has two mouths, a stub for a right paw, looks like left hand holds a melon on a stick or something, and there are pluses in the background for some reason. Not sure it'd call it "close to perfect" which the score seems to want to indicate.
    by embedding-shape
  • That's quite shocking, at a sufficiently advanced level we can make all non-realistic graphics purely out of SVGs, as they'd have good scaling for things like logos and app icons. I know it was technically and theoretically possible before AI but most people weren't spending hours tweaking SVG HTML. I remember making an SVG dark mode toggle icon and it took days to get it right, I assume it's one shottable now.
    by satvikpendem
  • 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 in your account. Ironically some of the few responses I actually saw in the Discord were doubling down on their “no refunds no matter what” policy.

    by frenchtoast8
  • That's crazy. Thanks for the heads up.
    by dominick-cc
  • I did get a response when sending to support@openrouter.ai about a year ago (complaining about some information claims), not about my account.
    by predkambrij
  • 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.
    by tocariimaa
  • Yeah their support is non-existent. It's actually mind-blowing that so many people use it.
    by enraged_camel
  • take screenshots of the responses and do a chargeback.
    by miyuru
  • They were just bought for $7B and rely on Discord?
    by Gecko4072
  • It's ability to handle non-90 degree cutouts and shapes for web dev is one of the best I've seen. The vision model on this is VERY capable.

    Here's an image design source of truth: https://image.non.io/78f4cd8b-2560-4643-9a51-96a89171f994.we...

    And here's the page it build from it: https://image.non.io/e7d3a9e5-f9df-4fd8-b79f-1f90280f978f.we...

    Note the flowing svg lines, and how accurately it recreated them. Here's Opus 5 for comparison - you can really see how while Astra really recreated the flow that was in the original design, opus only got the general vibe: https://image.non.io/dfe13de0-4487-431f-8b69-544ff3030dac.we...

    One thing I will say is you are paying for quality. That site build cost $24 - extremely non-trivial for a simple frontend.

    by jjcm