YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The pelicans place it nicely between Sol and Luna in terms of both pricing and results.

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.

My expectation is Fable 5.5 is next overall improvement, and my bet is OpenAI's "Bel" will be the next competitive one (or, their lack of safety culture will bite them/us in the process).

The "cost per task" metric is just a weaselly way to sound like they didn't just double the cost for most users, and aren't having their proverbial lunch money stolen. They can no longer claim to provide more tokens, more capable models, or more usage in general. So they made up a new metric where "task" could be defined to mean whatever they need it to mean.

They had to become VERY specific in their wording to present any kind of value proposition that will entice people.

[0] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-subscription...

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 if you want something cheaper than Sol but a lot smarter than Luna (especially for vision / computer use / communication). 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 is to make things clear and simple, even if we miss the mark sometimes.

Unfortunately, a lot of the complexity is somewhat irreducible and due to to the actual complexity of the products. Scaling model size is different from scaling reasoning effort which is different from scaling multi-agent count. So if we just swept all of those under a single name of "more IQ", it would make the naming simpler but the experience much worse, as important details would be obfuscated from end users.

Sure Sol 6.1 on low/medium can be considered "cheap" considering its abilities, but it's clearly not meant for the same type of tasks as Luna. You just grow an intuition for when something is solvable with a Luna-sized model. I'm guessing Terra is good for the tasks that you'd typically use Sol 6.1-low for, or for Luna type tasks (or other not-novel problem) where you want to reduce the risks of suboptimal decision making. It's exactly what I'd go with for feature additions where the correct solution is already mostly designed/specced-out.

Obviously not, otherwise the four models would be called Copilot, as well as the harness.

Luna (Small), Terra (Medium), Sol (Big), Astra (Bigger)

is perfectly clear, sol beats astra sometimes because Astra 6.1 was scrapped. and note that opus 5.5 beats fable 5.1 most of the time too without a skipped model.

"Speed, quality, price: pick two". I think I'd rather see a choice like that than the current convolution of $-per-token, sub quota, latency, simulated reasoning level, model size, context size, etc, etc.

I don't want to rush to their defense here, but, when model families are getting refreshed every 6 weeks, there is going to be significant overlap, particularly with these staggered releases

On subscription for coding and stuff I am basically on Astra Ultra all day long.

I think it's also a fake lever to give to finops / it teams to try and keep costs down.

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.

If you pay API prices for inference in your product stack & have specific use-cases w/ custom evals, these smaller models provide an additional cost/speed lever to adjust. Ultimately, I think the point is to compete on cost for use-cases where Sol on the lowest reasoning is overkill.

If you have a fairly straightforward usecase where Terra performs just as well as Sol, but is faster and cheaper, why not use it?

I have some business automation process for some customers that I maintain, where Terra with low reasoning ended up with the best price/performance & latency. With an equivalent Luna with high reasoning, price was usually better, but quality had a higher variance (very much depends on where the thinking takes the model) and latency for high reasoning was worse.