OpenAI has brought additional capacity online after demand for GPT-6.1 Sol put ChatGPT and Codex under heavy load. Speed should improve over the coming hours to almost twice the previous day's level, OpenAI's Tibo Sottiaux said on Oct. 1.
Sottiaux described GPT-6.1 Sol as “our most demanded model pretty much ever” across both the API and subscriptions. Earlier testing by Vals AI found it ran two to three times slower than GPT-6 Sol on tasks performed by AI agents, taking about 75 minutes per Vibe Code Bench task and 43 minutes per Legal Agent task.
Launched Sept. 29, GPT-6.1 Sol costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, one-fifth of Astra's standard prices. It scored one point below GPT-6 Astra on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, while costing $0.72 per task at maximum reasoning effort versus Astra's $3.26. Cached input costs $0.10 per million tokens, half the price for GPT-6 Sol.
Key sources
- SOURCE@thsottiaux“Within ChatGPT & Codex, we were under heavy load, but have brough more capacity online and the speed should get much better in the coming hours, reaching almost twice the speed compared to what we served yesterday.”x.com
- SUPPORT@openai“GPT-6.1 Sol: near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price.”x.com
- SUPPORT@artificialanlys“At max effort, GPT-6.1 Sol costs less than a quarter of GPT-6 Astra per Intelligence Index task ($0.72 vs $3.26).”x.com
- SUPPORT@theo“I'll say the quiet part out loud: GPT-6.1 Sol was not meant to be this cheap. Clearly they cut the price a ton to fight back.”x.com
- SUPPORT@cline“On DeepSWE v1.1, GPT‑6.1 Sol matches GPT‑6 Astra at roughly 1/5th of the cost!”x.com
- SUPPORT@synthwavedd“In case you were wondering, GPT-6.1 Sol is just renamed GPT-6 Astra Minor”x.com
- SUPPORT@adonis_singh“GPT-6.1-Sol gets #2 on eyebench-v3, stealing Opus-5.5s short-lived spot!”x.com
- SUPPORT@valsai“The catch is speed. It ran 2–3x slower than GPT-6 Sol on agentic tasks, taking about 75 min per Vibe Code Bench task and 43 min per Legal Agent task.”x.com