At least unless the Terminal Bench 4.0 score is more indicative than the other ones, because that one shows it clearly worse than 6.1 Sol for both performance and cost.

It's like iPhone 17 being faster than iPhone 16 Pro. Because it's newer and benefits from advances in chip architecture, despite being a lower model tier. Sometimes different iPhone models are released at different times.

I think the names are more of a reference to price. Luna is always cheaper than terra which is cheaper than Sol which is cheaper than Astra (for the same model number).

Yes, a more modern smaller model can beat an older bigger model at some tasks, that's what can be confusing.

“Test them all”

The lineup of models is still the same.

There are four models: luna, terra, sol, and astra.

Pricing increases for each level. This new 6.1 Terra is 50% cheaper than Sol 6.1.

They are lowering prices for newer releases, so yes if you compare Sol 6.1 to 5.6 Terra it won't look right, but why are you doing that? Look at the same release version for comparable numbers.

Each model improves in successive releases but they maintain pricing and capability coherency within a release version.

Yes, Sol 6.1 is supposed to rival Astra for some work, which is what you'd expect from a later versioned release model against a prior release bigger model.

Assuming they release Astra 6.1 at some point, I expect it'll be better than Sol 6.1, at a higher price.

I don't understand what people are asking for here? No reductions in pricing? Different model names on every version release? Not releasing any models for a version number until they're all ready?

If you scale a model down, or switch out attention with linear attention, or introduce KV-compression, etc., you don't really know how it will affect model performance before you've trained the model.

And once you've spent millions training it, you might as well make it available if it's pareto optimal for some tasks. It also gives you more insight seeing how people use it in practice.

You are also rolling the training of your models by size and the lat est small model can sometimes beat an older model.

For a while we thought you just train the big model first then distill smaller models from it but since we've learnt the importance of on policy RL (basically the way a small model figures out a problem is very diff from a big model so it's best to RL optimize each model distinctly)

And some variants (e.g., the medium one) being skipped or delayed for a certain generation doesn't really change the overall size branding.

It's nice that they have Terra which seems to fill a void that's been needed since Sol 6 focused on cost (at the expense of quality), Sol 6.1 got a huge boost in quality, but became unusably slow unless you paid Astra prices - at which point, why not just use Astra?

Now at least we have a viable other option again.

In general, LLM performance is incredibly multidimensional. There's no guarantee of a fixed ordering where the model that is best at math is also the model that's best at jokes. Despite that complexity, much of the variation in performance is explained by just a single variable: model size. In general, models that are bigger will (a) be more performant / reliable, (b) cost more per token, and (c) have better recall of esoteric facts. As you note, our models are ordered:

Luna < Terra < Sol < Astra

Even today, I'd recommend this as a general starting point for picking models. If you care about quality only, pick Astra. If you're a bit price sensitive, pick Sol. If you're very price sensitive, pick Terra or Luna.

Of course, model size doesn't capture all variation. Models that are trained later might have new data or new techniques or new architectures that earlier models lack. You can see this with models from all providers - Sonnet 5.5 outperforms Fable 5.1 in ways, and Gemini 3.8 Flash outperforms 3.1 Pro in ways.

In the case of GPT-6.1 Terra, I'd say Terra is probably better than Astra and Sol at technical communication, similar on vision and computer use (while being faster / cheaper), and a bit worse on most other things. For API developers, it's a nice midrange option where want something cheaper than Sol but a lot smarter than Luna. For subscribers, it's not a bombshell release - if you're hitting usage limits, maybe it helps you go a bit further, and if you want clearer communication or faster computer use, it can be a nice option to select.

If you have suggestions on how to name our products better, I'm all ears. Our intention to make things clear and simple, even if we miss the mark sometimes.

if you're just talking about use in codex or claude code, then sure, leave it on opus all the time. but for running routine api requests, sonnet is great.

To justify the pricing of Sol and Astra. Old business trick.