GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
- ID
- 29936
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 30 Sep 2026, 1:06 AM
- Fetched
- 30 Sep 2026, 4:16 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-6-1-sol/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.5
- Created
- 30 Sep 2026, 4:17 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnersai_agent_userssaas_startup_foundersvibe_coders
What happened
OpenAI announced GPT-6.1 Sol, an upgrade to GPT-6 Sol that it says nearly matches GPT-6 Astra's intelligence on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth of Astra's standard input and output token prices. Cached input is priced at $0.10 per million tokens, which OpenAI says is 95% less than its standard input pricing and 50% less than GPT-6 Sol's cached input pricing. The post cites vendor-run evaluations: on DeepSWE v1.1 it matches GPT-6 Astra at roughly one-fifth the cost and beats GPT-6 Sol's best score by 6.4 percentage points, on GDP.pdf it scores above Opus 5.5 with fallbacks at less than half the cost per task, and on AutomationBench 1.0.6 it is 2.2 points above Opus 5.5 at medium reasoning effort at roughly a third of the cost, up 4.8 points from GPT-6 Sol.
Why it matters
The only hard, checkable number here is the cached input price: $0.10 per million tokens, 95% below standard input and half of GPT-6 Sol's cached rate. If your agent reuses long context across requests (large system prompts, retrieved documents, tool schemas), that is where your bill actually moves, so re-run your own cost estimate rather than the benchmark table. Everything else is self-reported by the vendor, including a caveat that the Claude Fable 5.1 comparison understates its cost because it omits fallbacks that occurred on ~40% of AutomationBench tasks — treat the rankings as unverified until you test on your own tasks. No Malaysia-specific detail appears in this text.
Discussion angle
The AutomationBench footnote admits a competitor's cost figure excludes fallbacks that happened on ~40% of tasks — so how should builders compare agent costs when vendors report price-per-task without fallback rates? Ask people to share what their own cost-per-completed-task looks like versus the headline token price.