OpenAI launches GPT-6.1 Sol at a fraction of GPT-6 Astra's price
2026-10-01
Per Latent Space's AINews digest of AI Twitter activity (covering Oct 1-2, 2026), OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol priced at $2/$10 per million input/output tokens, versus $10/$50 for GPT-6 Astra. OpenAI staff described it as "good, cheap AND fast." On an aggregator-tracked Agent Arena leaderboard, Sol debuted at #5 with a reported $0.56 median cost per task, said to be 39% cheaper than GPT-6 Sol while scoring 1.52 points higher, and 81% cheaper than Astra while landing within about 1 point of it.
Significance 4: A roughly 80% list-price cut alongside a new model release clears the rubric's bar for a significant pricing change, but the only source in hand is a single curator's aggregation of social-media posts with no primary OpenAI announcement yet fetched, so the specific benchmark deltas are unverified.
Implications · machine-drafted, not owner judgment
If the pricing and benchmark numbers hold up independently, Sol gives OpenAI a credible low-cost tier that undercuts its own flagship by roughly 80% while staying close to it on quality — a lever DeepSeek and the open-weights labs have used against OpenAI, now turned back on them. It's the first serious closed-lab challenge to DeepSeek V4's cost lead on the owner's bulk-cheap verdict, and another data point in how fast the price floor for capable models keeps dropping.
- An independent Artificial Analysis pricing/speed benchmark for GPT-6.1 Sol.
- A primary OpenAI announcement confirming the price and benchmark figures.
Sources
- curator [AINews] not much happened today retrieved 2026-10-03
Affected axes
Cost · Output speed · Coding · Agentic / tool use