GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter
146 points - yesterday at 9:39 PM
Sourcesimonw
yesterday at 10:45 PM
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...
threatripper
today at 3:52 AM
It seems to start understanding how bicycles work. Look at the front fork. There are reasons why it's shaped the way it is in real bicycles. If you do physical simulations in 3D with reinforcement learning you will start understanding that most of the arrangements that the other agents use just won't work.
steve-atx-7600
today at 1:57 AM
You would not expect the developers of the model to optimize for a well known benchmark?
I would expect it happens more organically where people’s discussion of the benchmark and posted results find their way into the training data, like anything else on the internet.
What is this supposed to mean exactly? Do you think there are developers at OpenAI or Anthropic whose job is to train these state of the art models to draw pelicans riding bicycles? Like how exactly do you expect them to be doing that anyways? Hiring graphic artists to create SVGs of bike riding pelicans and feeding thousands of them into the model's training set?
mudkipdev
today at 2:41 AM
Generate two images, get a vision model to judge, then RL reward the better one. And yes, OpenAI employees on twitter bragged about the model's SVG capabilities. So there are clearly people working there who care about it.
awakeasleep
today at 2:40 AM
You gotta look up how RLHF works before you ask a demanding question like this.
It stopped being a valuable benchmark proxy quite a few model versions ago. Simon knows it, so is everyone who’s serious about it
Treat it like a bit as is
It's actually not just valuable, but infinitely valuable. Because it's imaginary, there is no way to do it perfectly, and thus the possibilities are endless, and it tests out both the formulation and execution of ideas.
jsdalton
today at 12:40 AM
Simon do you have a page somewhere that shows _all_ of the penguins created by various models across time?
You’ve been doing this public service for so long (well, for so long in “AI hype” years anyway) that it’d be fascinating to see the evolution of this artifact across time.
I find curios that Astra's pelicans are basically the same (yellow sun top right corner, green bike, same bike shape, same legs style, very similar background) while in other there is more randomness.
This tracks with what OpenAI has been saying about Astra: that it tends to do things in a certain way and it’s up to you to prompt it to change its style.
pizza234
today at 12:42 AM
Astra is the only model that correctly depicts occlusion of crank and leg, although interestingly, at max and medium levels (not in between).
Looked to me like it missed the chain though.
PacificSpecific
today at 3:51 AM
Fallen off the homepage so what? I genuinely don't understand
BrokenCogs
yesterday at 11:47 PM
Interesting that all of the bikes are turquoise colored, except for the medium effort
Astra pelican looks amazing: it looks like it was made by a professional artist. All the others look like they were made by kindergartners.
Xunjin
yesterday at 11:41 PM
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.
I have a feeling they've been doing that for a while now, even if unintentional, as it's such a well known benchmark
radial spokes on the back wheel is not a thing irl. i wonder if any model has gotten that right?
You’re closer to this than I am but do you find it odd that helmets are almost never included? Biking is almost always accompanied by helmets
maxlapdev
today at 1:32 AM
But pelicans are almost never accompanied by helmets, so it cancels out.
> Biking is almost always accompanied by helmets
Isnt Netherlands the leader in bike riders and they dont wear helmets.
neutronicus
today at 1:38 AM
At least one reasoning trace I saw considered a helmet and discarded the idea because it was worried about obscuring some detail
Luna is my go to daily model it's great value
Me toooo, for all my personal projects I need to pay for the tokens~
At workplace I use sol because I don't need to pay
Mine as well, it’s fast and keeps me in flow; and cheap!
Luna's price seems off
The price is probably coming from when Luna was first released. OpenAI slashed the price by 80% at the end of July.
Yes! Good catch, thanks - I'll fix that.
I had the prices wrong on Sol and Terra as well - they've all had price drops:
https://openai.com/index/advancing-the-price-performance-fro...
Sol discount is until November 21, 2026 according to https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/changelog
Luna — costs in cents
+--------+--------+---------+
| Effort | Before | After |
+--------+--------+---------+
| max | 7.83 | 1.57 |
| xhigh | 4.24 | 0.85 |
| high | 2.46 | 0.49 |
| medium | 1.26 | 0.25 |
| low | 0.76 | 0.15 |
| none | 0.71 | 0.14 |
+--------+--------+---------+
Per million tokens:
Before: $1 input / $6 output
After: $0.20 input / $1.20 output
Sol — costs in cents
+--------+--------+---------+
| Effort | Before | After |
+--------+--------+---------+
| max | 48.55 | 32.37 |
| xhigh | 24.11 | 16.08 |
| high | 10.38 | 6.92 |
| medium | 10.55 | 7.03 |
| low | 8.33 | 5.55 |
| none | 5.90 | 3.93 |
+--------+--------+---------+
Per million tokens:
Before: $5 input / $30 output
After: $4 input / $20 output
Terra — costs in cents
+--------+--------+---------+
| Effort | Before | After |
+--------+--------+---------+
| max | 32.09 | 25.67 |
| xhigh | 14.67 | 11.74 |
| high | 3.74 | 2.99 |
| medium | 3.46 | 2.77 |
| low | 3.47 | 2.78 |
| none | 2.60 | 2.08 |
+--------+--------+---------+
Per million tokens:
Before: $2.50 input / $15 output
After: $2 input / $12 output
leoqa
yesterday at 10:53 PM
[flagged]
samuelknight
yesterday at 11:12 PM
How are we supposed to know if Astra is frontier without the pelican?
satvikpendem
yesterday at 11:29 PM
It's simonw. It's interesting to see their pelican benchmark, another comment by a different author elsewhere here shows some very good SVG generation too.
ComplexSystems
yesterday at 11:00 PM
It's absolutely related.
StopTheCringe
today at 12:07 AM
[flagged]
XCSme
yesterday at 10:54 PM
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.
satvikpendem
yesterday at 11:32 PM
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.
I thought all the designers have been using vector graphics for a long time now.
Aldus Freehand 1.0 was released in 1988. Adobe Illustrator was first released in 1987.
That photo looks pretty hilariously stupid, so this appears to be more of a first toe dip rather than some indication we can one-shot a previously difficult process.
appplication
today at 12:22 AM
Sure, it is a bit cartoonish but it’s relatively impressive. I do wonder what you would get if you asked for photorealism
embedding-shape
yesterday at 11:14 PM
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.
XCSme
yesterday at 11:23 PM
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/
XCSme
yesterday at 11:49 PM
I've replaced "Score" there with model ranking, to reduce confusion, thanks for the feedback!
The Astra one looks pretty good except it's standing on the wrong side of the table
kingstnap
yesterday at 10:07 PM
Its also available finally to Pro users! Just took 24 hours.
InsideOutSanta
yesterday at 10:19 PM
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
wincy
yesterday at 10:25 PM
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!
paxys
yesterday at 10:40 PM
That's a pretty genius internal incentive to move fast.
embedding-shape
yesterday at 10:44 PM
> 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.
Just got access to it on Plus plan in Australia. 2 Banked resets as well.
Played in codex app a couple of hours today: it feels much faster than SOL, even if the TPS is half of it.
algoth1
yesterday at 10:24 PM
Just got it. European plus user here. Only codex, no chatgpt
jaesonaras
today at 12:30 AM
Anyone had success using Astra as a Foundry model via Github Copilot? The error I get is that tooling is not available if reasoning has a value.
gavinray
yesterday at 10:22 PM
I have GPT-6 access in Codex and OpenAI API now
I'm a Business plan user with Cyber verification enabled, FWIW.
embedding-shape
yesterday at 10:44 PM
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.
r_lee
yesterday at 10:11 PM
is Azure for this actually ZDR?
starik36
yesterday at 10:55 PM
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?
It's the same price as regular processing. You get guarantees microsoft give you, which are ones OpenAI won't (or require dedicated spend,) and you can use azure identities for access.
claiir
yesterday at 11:32 PM
They’re ZDR and the OAI ones aren’t
WTHIT?
ZDR = Zero Data Retention — they don't store your inputs/outputs.
itsjustkev
yesterday at 11:23 PM
Compared to OpenAI flex? I'm pretty sure that is their batch processing endpoint, which is naturally cheaper.
cute_boi
yesterday at 10:32 PM
I got it, but sadly no resets...
vatsachak
yesterday at 10:13 PM
Damn I am so hyped
marsven_422
today at 12:36 AM
[dead]
StopTheCringe
today at 12:07 AM
[flagged]
OpenGayEye_
today at 12:12 AM
[flagged]
noob0053
yesterday at 10:40 PM
[dead]
taywrobel
yesterday at 10:43 PM
You made an account just to post this?
6thbit
yesterday at 11:15 PM
Invoking simonw for pelicans pretty please.
Osama0456
yesterday at 9:55 PM
is it finally available on openrouter and what about fable 5.1
r_lee
yesterday at 10:13 PM
that's literally what the link is for...