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Simon Willison: GPT-6 Astra at its lowest reasoning level beats GPT-5.6 Sol at any level, for 9.55 cents
Willison got Astra access on 2026-09-04 and ran the pelican-on-a-bicycle SVG test across low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning (Astra has no reasoning=none). Every Astra output from low upward beat the best GPT-5.6 result, and Astra low cost 9.55 cents against Sol's $5/$30 per-million pricing versus Astra's $10/$50. He notes Astra below max still fails to place the pelican's legs on both sides of the frame, and speculates from token-count fingerprints (Astra and Luna both used 16 input tokens, Sol and Terra 26) that Astra and Luna may share more architecture than OpenAI has said.
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