A day with Sol 6.1: capable but hard to talk to, like Opus 5
A developer says Sol 6.1 is capable but wordy and weak on judgment, suspects it is distilled from Astra, and argues the low price targets enterprise API customers while consumer quotas are halved.
used sol 6.1 for a whole day and i'm very.. confused will try my best to break down the key things to know 1. sol 6.1 reminds me of opus 5 this is a model that makes me constantly have to ask "wtf are you talking about" it's very capable. most of the time once i understood what it meant, it did mean the right thing. but it's a pain to get through its choice of words i hope there's a sol 6.5 coming that ends up being what opus 5.5 was to opus 5 and get this fixed 2. it's bigger than previous sol you can easily observe the slowness that comes with this model. this hints at it being a bigger model than 5.6 sol. but my confusion is why it's priced at terra and sonnet range then i realized, the pricing is set to attract enterprise customers who pay at API rate for consumers who buy the $200 subscription, the lower price doesn't mean more usage because they're cutting the subscription's quota by half so i guess the intention is to give enterprise customers an opus competitor at lower price, while holding back the benefit from consumers 3. all gpt models still suffer from poor judgment sol 6.1 is likely taught by astra. if you read some of its code, it smell like astra code. it also inherited astra's strength which is that it can get stuff done with less turns and tokens (even opus 5.5 hasn't got to this level of efficiency yet) but... the biggest problem to me is still "judgment". this is most obvious when i start to use either astra or sol 6.1 as my firstmate - everything simply starts to fall apart because of poor decision making for example it would see me approving a plan and decide to file it in the backlog rather than the more obvious next step which is to start implementation (which opus 5.5 and fable would always "just know" it should do) all signs point to a lack of human judgment in post training - all gpt models are likely heavily optimized by RLVR overall - i'd categorize sol 6.1 as a solid implementer and reviewer, but i would not use it interactively openai has work to do - right now they simply don't have an opus 5.5 equivalent anywhere in its line up, which is problematic but seeing how anthropic could come back from opus 5, there's still hope :)