GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%

Posted by Topfi 16 hours ago

GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%(openrouter.ai)

516 points | 330 commentspage 4

hk__2 5 hours ago|

In my experience, "Sol" stands for "Stupid overengineering LLM". I’ve tried it at low/medium/high/xhigh effort levels and after a while I always end up to regretting my switch from Opus/Fable.

jeffybefffy519 9 hours ago||

Reading the comments in this thread, i honestly dont get it. 5.6-sol has felt like a regression in capability. In fact, every model since 5.3-codex has been a regression from OpenAI. I just find 5.6-Sol over engineers problems, takes absolutely ages to solve basic problems....

At this point, I'm considering going back to cursor over codex due to the ability to get more control over what model I use since there is clearly a heap of user preference and having frontier providers constantly shift the goal post with "State of the Art" is complete non-sense.

jeswin 9 hours ago||

It depends on what effort you're using etc. As an example [1] of what codex is capable of, here's hugo (written in golang) ported to TypeScript - and then a TypeScript to Rust transpiler which converts arbitrary TypeScript into Rust.

The TypeScript code which was transpiled into Rust (and is compatible with most hugo templates) runs faster than the original hugo.

[1]: https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsonic-examples/tree/main/rust...

The transpiler is still WIP, but the fact that it can do this says a lot of about how far LLMs have come.

jeffybefffy519 3 hours ago||

I find all effort levels of sol are the same in terms of amount of hallucinated unnecessary changes. Luna is much better all round on xhigh but my point still stands, every release of these new models is not an upgrade, its re-learning how to work with it.

Its like rehiring an employee every few months then training them up. Its honestly tiring and cant stay like this.

Opus has the same problem too…

jeswin 3 hours ago||

That's not been my experience. My prompting methods haven't changed much between recent GPT releases. I do put a lot of effort into building tooling and tests around a project, so the LLM output is converging around it.

jeffybefffy519 2 hours ago||

Can you give examples of the tooling and tests?

jeswin 49 minutes ago||

Sure.

This is the csharp target for tsonic. It has a bunch of tests here: https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsonic-csharp/tree/main/test

More comprehensive e2e proving grounds are at

1: https://github.com/tsoniclang/proof-is-in-the-pudding

2: https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsumo/

They were built specifically for testing the C# target. There are several other large projects we built specifically for e2e testing.

But the more interesting thing would be the tooling built to support this. For example, our current TypeScript parser [1] is a file-by-file port of Microsoft's TypeScript V7 compiler written in golang. The challenge here is that every time Microsoft changes code, we'll have to fix our code and tests. It's doable, but a fair amount of work.

So we decided to write tooling to transpile Microsoft's v7 compiler from golang, and autogenerate our compiler. That tool is called gotots [2] - and it already produces a fully working TypeScript compiler. It's 3x slower than TypeScript v6 compiler, but we hope to get to rough performance parity in a week or so. Everytime Microsoft makes an update, we run gotots and our parser gets updated as well.

[1]: The old parser - https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsts-legacy

[2]: Golang to TypeScript transpiler - https://github.com/tsoniclang/gotots

tonyhart7 9 hours ago|||

its over engineered problem solver ???? well because its a designed to do that

if you want to solve basic problem then use Luna

jeffybefffy519 3 hours ago||

I mean it added additional changes when it doesnt need to. Its basically hallucinating changes it thinks it needs to make regardless of effort levels i try.

SadErn 9 hours ago||

[dead]

bigbluedots 6 hours ago||

These threads seem to have become exceedingly vibes-based. Yes, something may now be cheaper or more expensive or whatever, but there is no way to objectively measure quality (except for "trust me bro" benchmarks). So the discourse is people saying that for them, this or that model was better - which is a very low value data point.

oblio 6 hours ago|

> These threads seem to have become exceedingly vibes-based.

If you remember programming language discussions, they are exactly like this.

Software development is still in the leeches and bloodlettings phase.

bigbluedots 5 hours ago||

Yes, programming language discussions can be vibes-based and therefore low value too, but sometimes the more concrete aspects of the languages at hand, e.g. language features and tradeoffs are discussed. That is something that I'm not seeing in equivalent AI discussions.. there is a lot of how a particular AI model "feels" to interact with.

ComputerGuru 12 hours ago||

Does OpenRouter eat this cost to get their hands on a copy of the conversations people are using with the model?

9cb14c1ec0 11 hours ago||

No, this is OpenAI doing the discount, not Openrouter by themselves. OpenAI is crushing it with their 5.6 models, and they probably decided there was no better time to grab as much market share as possible.

ComputerGuru 28 minutes ago|||

But the discount is only available via OpenRouter.

Noaidi 10 hours ago|||

I don’t understand this at all. They have never been profitable yet. How is this helping them? When it be more likely the case that not enough, people are using it as the prices they established already? So now they have to lower the prices?

ipaddr 8 hours ago|||

You lower prices for marketshare. Fable became a mythological model to leadership because they were the first story of ai escaping and hacking another company. The it's so dangerous the public can't use it narrative is sticky so OpenAI is showing off its model so as many eyeballs as possible. We're in the samples in the supermarket phase.

nprateem 8 hours ago|||

They're prepping to IPO. They want top level metrics like usage they can use to pump investors, not nonsense like profitability.

voiper1 8 hours ago||

OpenRouter offers 1% discount to save your conversations, explicitly opt-in.

Anything else they don't save it. Even if they tell you the model provider saves your data for training.

dvrp 12 hours ago||

For context, Stripe has just acquired OpenRouter for >$7B.

I’d bet that explains this move!

indigodaddy 11 hours ago||

Why would the potential acquisition have anything to do with this? They do discounts all the time on various models. Luna was 50% off last week..

gip 11 hours ago||

Not sure as OpenAI models (Sol, Luna,..) are also discounted on the Vercel AI Gateway rn. My bet is on OpenAI trying to drive more enterprise customers to their models through API.

Topology1 10 hours ago||

How can they do this? Are they subsidizing it out of pocket?

ben8bit 8 hours ago||

Terra is also a fantastic model.

shevy-java 8 hours ago||

They are really getting desperate. The bubble is coming closer to an end here.

gutterscale 7 hours ago||

GPT-5.6 sol starting to be a real workhorse at this price point

kristo 4 hours ago|

It shocks me how little people seem to care that they are supporting an evil Zionist lizard man who molested his sister and is happy supporting trump. Doesn’t even come up in the conversation here. I don’t really care if sol is a bit better, I still make decisions on more than that.

Is the HN community just too online and sucked in to the musk mind manipulation vortex? Or what is going on? Why does nobody seem to care?

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