I think this is a genuinely interesting comparison grid. Astra may be more expensive, but if you have a budget of 10 cents for a Pelican Astra low gives you something SO much better than the other models.
Astra uses less tokens overall too, for better results.
That's quite shocking, at a sufficiently advanced level we can make all non-realistic graphics purely out of SVGs, as they'd have good scaling for things like logos and app icons. I know it was technically and theoretically possible before AI but most people weren't spending hours tweaking SVG HTML. I remember making an SVG dark mode toggle icon and it took days to get it right, I assume it's one shottable now.
At the bottom it says "Score 98.58", what measure is used for this score? It's kind of horrible, the perspective is all off (legs of the table makes that very obvious), the mouse/hamster has two mouths, a stub for a right paw, looks like left hand holds a melon on a stick or something, and there are pluses in the background for some reason. Not sure it'd call it "close to perfect" which the score seems to want to indicate.
They gave out bankable resets for every day people on pro plans didn't get Astra. Given that, I wish they'd waited a few more days before activating it on my account :-D
They haven’t activated Astra for me yet, I have two resets now. I’ve been using the opportunity to test out how good 5.6 Sol is at computer use asking it to generate stuff in Blender which has been… interesting
Edit: nevermind it JUST gave me a notification to use it!
Same just got access literally this minute, Pro user here, no Cyber verification but have passed my ID over to them back in 2024 or something, maybe at the ChatGPT 3 API launch or something?
Has there been anything published about if Astra uses different amount of usage from your subscription plan compared to Sol? Don't recall coming across that in the press releases.
I posted this in the other Astra thread but it's just fallen off the homepage, so...
Pelicans from Astra, plus 5.6 Sol, Terra, Luna for comparison: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-6-and-5.6-p...
I think this is a genuinely interesting comparison grid. Astra may be more expensive, but if you have a budget of 10 cents for a Pelican Astra low gives you something SO much better than the other models.
Astra uses less tokens overall too, for better results.
Astra transcript here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
Do you have other ideas of "combinations" for this kind of benchmark?
I'm wondering if this is being trained on by the models today.
That's some crazy SVG generation:
https://aibenchy.com/compare/openai-gpt-6-astra-high/google-...
It took a while to test it, initially OpenRouter was giving Not Found errors for this model ID.
That's quite shocking, at a sufficiently advanced level we can make all non-realistic graphics purely out of SVGs, as they'd have good scaling for things like logos and app icons. I know it was technically and theoretically possible before AI but most people weren't spending hours tweaking SVG HTML. I remember making an SVG dark mode toggle icon and it took days to get it right, I assume it's one shottable now.
At the bottom it says "Score 98.58", what measure is used for this score? It's kind of horrible, the perspective is all off (legs of the table makes that very obvious), the mouse/hamster has two mouths, a stub for a right paw, looks like left hand holds a melon on a stick or something, and there are pluses in the background for some reason. Not sure it'd call it "close to perfect" which the score seems to want to indicate.
Do you prefer the fable one?
It's more "correct" but looks a lot worse in my opinion:
https://aibenchy.com/compare/openai-gpt-6-astra-high/google-...
Yeah, that's confusing, the score is for the entire benchmark, not for SVG generation only.
Good point about the mouths, I just noticed, lol
Imo, it's still better than most models, I personally like the stylized perspective.
You can view here all generations for all models: https://aibenchy.com/showcase/
Its also available finally to Pro users! Just took 24 hours.
They gave out bankable resets for every day people on pro plans didn't get Astra. Given that, I wish they'd waited a few more days before activating it on my account :-D
That's a pretty genius internal incentive to move fast.
> They gave out bankable resets for every day people on pro plans didn't get Astra.
Yeah, when I saw that Tweet I knew the person was saying it because they knew it'll be available within 24h.
They haven’t activated Astra for me yet, I have two resets now. I’ve been using the opportunity to test out how good 5.6 Sol is at computer use asking it to generate stuff in Blender which has been… interesting
Edit: nevermind it JUST gave me a notification to use it!
I have GPT-6 access in Codex and OpenAI API now
I'm a Business plan user with Cyber verification enabled, FWIW.
Same just got access literally this minute, Pro user here, no Cyber verification but have passed my ID over to them back in 2024 or something, maybe at the ChatGPT 3 API launch or something?
Has there been anything published about if Astra uses different amount of usage from your subscription plan compared to Sol? Don't recall coming across that in the press releases.
Just got it. European plus user here. Only codex, no chatgpt
is Azure for this actually ZDR?
What is the actual utility of using this model on Azure? It's twice as expensive, according to the link.
Do Azure offer something that simply hitting the OpenAI endpoint doesn't provide?
They’re ZDR and the OAI ones aren’t
Compared to OpenAI flex? I'm pretty sure that is their batch processing endpoint, which is naturally cheaper.
Damn I am so hyped
I got it, but sadly no resets...
Invoking simonw for pelicans pretty please.
That's over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49570643
is it finally available on openrouter and what about fable 5.1
that's literally what the link is for...