Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users

Posted by tedsanders 12 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by heaney-555 9 hours ago

Giving free ChatGPT users access to reasoning (the 'Think' toggle) will have a broader impact on the world than every new paid model and coding agent combined.

Comment by vitorgrs 1 minute ago

There was already thinking in free model though. They removed the option a while ago and made it automatic... But you could force by just saying "think hard" or whatever.

Comment by daemonologist 8 hours ago

Going from 5.5 Instant (which was noticeably bad) to 5.6 Luna is a big jump as well. OpenAI is probably the most prominent among the general public - an advantage in some respects but they're giving away a lot of free inference and thus have to use a pretty small model to do it.

Comment by johnsmith1840 8 hours ago

I really don't see how they're going to be google here. The free tier is dominated by verticle integration and the platform that people use. Long term I imagine google wins the bottom of the market and I'd be suprised if they lost.

Comment by ramraj07 4 hours ago

Even a long while ago it was estimated that every Google search cost google several cents (and that they made back 10 cents). Google also uses AI for search results. Thus its not inconceivable that openai can make money here.

Comment by johnsmith1840 3 hours ago

I typed wrong I mean I don't see how they will beat google. Google is the only true vertically integrated AI company meaning they own price at the bottom margins with their own chips and models made just for them.

Comment by ekidd 1 hour ago

Google's public AI model lineup is pretty bad right now. Gemini 3.1 Pro is scoring worse than some mid-sized Chinese models at 1/20th the cost, and their Flash and Flash Light models are horrendously overpriced on task benchmarks compared to GPT 5.6 Luna or the mid-sized Chinese models.

There's no reason why Google's public stuff is this stale, overpriced and underwhelming. But at least until their next round of models drops, even calling them a "frontier lab" is starting to feel like a stretch. Which is weird!

Comment by eru 35 minutes ago

It's interesting that Google fell behind before and managed to get back up to the frontier. But, boy, is their performance in this race uneven.

Especially considering that in the 2010s they were The Big AI company, especially after buying out boutique shops like DeepMind.

Comment by willy_k 43 minutes ago

That doesn’t matter very much for the free tier market though. The game is to have something useable that is actually used, and that can be offered at sustainable margins. Google has significant advantages in those regards.

Comment by tokioyoyo 7 hours ago

Ads.

Comment by stymaar 7 hours ago

Ads work when you can server $.01 worth of ads to a user for $.0001 of server cost. I fail to see how you can make it work when doing LLM inference which is significantly costlier than web search.

Comment by theptip 26 minutes ago

OpenAI can very plausibly target ads far better than Google can.

Email is a good window but lots of people talk in more depth with a chat bot.

Search is a good “purchase intent moment” but people are telling a chat bot exactly what they care about in a purchase, rather than making indirect search terms and reading review sites.

Comment by tokioyoyo 7 hours ago

In about 4 months, OpenAI’s fundraiser decks will leak, which will include their current ad revenue.

Comment by livinglist 2 hours ago

Is this a promise or speculation?

Comment by keeda 3 hours ago

That's a problem Google has to solve too ;-)

To expand: it seems inevitable that Google's SERP format will be replaced with a conversational / chatbot / agentic interface, which equalizes the playing field for all chatbot providers.

This is because you can stuff in much fewer ads into a chat interface compared to SERPs. (They could try stuffing more ads but that would likely just push users more to the competition who have a much lower baseline on which to show growth.) As such, Google would be forced to progressively nullify its own invincible firehose of ad revenue as they deprecate SERPs in favor of AI overviews.

Comment by red_green_yell 42 minutes ago

Google has multiple massive cost advantages over OAI: TPUs, free access to massively valuable data (search index, gmail, maps reviews/PO/ navigation, youtube, android etc.), lower talent costs, lower training costs, lower distribution costs (they can shove AI down our throats in so many different places), lower ad infrastructure costs (it will be a lot of work for OAI to recreate adwords), lower ad sales costs (OAI deploying an ad sales team will be a massive investment).

There's no way OAI has a long term advantage over google in replacing the search engine experience.

Google's one major weakness is it will face the innovator's dilemma as their core search revenue gets cannibalized. But they seem to have been able to get their entire org to recognize that AI is an existential threat so at least that's a good sign.

Comment by eru 33 minutes ago

I'm not sure Google has lower talent costs. What makes you think so?

Comment by willy_k 41 minutes ago

Have you used the Google search engine in the past couple years?

You’re painting a dichotomy that doesn’t exist and hasn’t for a good while.

Edit: I missed your final paragraph. I still disagree with this argument though, people still want to go to websites.

Comment by famouswaffles 6 hours ago

> I fail to see how you can make it work when doing LLM inference which is significantly costlier than web search.

The median LLM query isn't significantly costlier than web search.

Comment by virgildotcodes 6 hours ago

I recently saw some discussion about the CPC for personal injury lawyers being ~$200 on Google ads. Seems insane to me, but I’m totally disconnected from the advertising world. That said, depending on the conversion rates between chats and clicks, the math could be favorable for OAI.

Comment by mikeshi42 5 hours ago

High CACs are supported by high LTVs, that is about the right ballpark for things like lawyers or even plumbers.

Comment by kristofferR 6 hours ago

90+% of queries are probably so common/evergreen that, if a cheaper model made all the different language varients and ways of asking the question into one query, they could be cached quite effectively.

Comment by fragmede 4 hours ago

Except that Google is giving AI answers for ~every search now, so they're paying that cost for every search now as well.

Comment by theptip 25 minutes ago

I bet they cache a lot more than OpenAI can though.

Comment by johnsmith1840 3 hours ago

More like LLMs are near commodity at the common tier the ones who wins are those who can inference the cheapest and google is easily thr best positioned to do that with many years of custom chip model optimization.

Google is going to be able to push cost down further and for longer than anyone else. They also rightfully believe this is a company ending gamble if they fail they could be a second tier player for decades.

So better inference margins, far better operation experience serving cheap AI at massive scale, a massive warchest, and the fear of complete company irrelevence.

That's going to be one hell of a company to beat for free tier LLMs. Also chatgpt is impressive but it's notthing like google search quite yet. On top of that AI labs must use google's product for their AI.

They also own more data by an exponential margin. Anything but dominance of free AI on google's side would mean they are just so incompetent they deserve to fail.

Comment by Tostino 8 hours ago

People tell these models everything. You don't think a pretty unethical company can figure out a way to monetize that?

Comment by fragmede 3 hours ago

If someone tells ChatGPT I'm cheating on my wife, sure, unethically they could blackmail the user but that seems like a stretch.

Comment by hluska 3 hours ago

I think the consumer profiling side is more compelling (and likely) than blackmail.

Comment by Tostino 2 hours ago

Yup, that is where my mind was.

Comment by gavinray 8 hours ago

I'm not sure people fully comprehend the trickle-down pop-culture/zeitgeist effects that LLM's are having/are going to have on humanity.

Because everyone now outsources much of their thinking and researching to LLM's, our collective culture + brain is shaped in a cyclical manner by using them.

It's the mechanical homogenization of culture and groupthink.

Comment by crab_galaxy 3 hours ago

Is that really accurate though? I use Claude in my software job but the majority of my friends do not use it at all. And I never use it for anything other than that either.

TBH I don’t find it useful at all for personal use. It’s totally soulless for creative ventures and absolute dogshit at researching the things I want it to be good at (I.e. planning a vacation or finding new music).

All that combined with the social stigma makes me feel pretty skeptical that it’s some kind of pop culture shaping mechanism, at least not for a few more years.

Comment by jimbob45 32 minutes ago

+1 to this. Many of my engineer friends don’t use AI even in cases where it could clearly help them. Not out of any principles stance but because they just don’t understand that it could speed up their work. It doesn’t help that the advertising surrounding AI hasn’t communicated its benefits well - either you’ve tried it and you get it or you just don’t know. I would imagine some early horseback riders in the 20th century probably felt similarly about the automobile.

Comment by fragmede 2 hours ago

We're all in our own personal bubbles and extrapolating from there as normal, but ChatGPT has some 800 million users, most of them outside the US. Countries like the Philippines and Thailand. I don't think they're all vibecoding the hottest new SaaS app but maybe they are.

Comment by in-silico 6 hours ago

Does the free tier really not have access to reasoning models?

That would explain a lot of the terrible AI/LLM takes online.

Comment by heaney-555 6 hours ago

The free tier of ChatGPT is powered by GPT-5.5 Instant, a non-reasoning version of GPT 5.5.

Comment by qingcharles 2 hours ago

Also, remember the bulk of AI users are using free models, getting terrible answers, and wondering why people keep saying AI is going to take everybody's jobs away.

Comment by fragmede 3 hours ago

Yes. Go to chat.com in an incognito window and ask it the same question that you ask 5.6-sol with thinking max, and compare. Depending on the question there is or is not a huge difference.

Comment by thorum 7 hours ago

Free users have had access to reasoning for a while. o4-mini and the initial GPT-5 launch both included reasoning modes for free users.

They took away the button a few months ago and are now putting it back.

Comment by heaney-555 7 hours ago

Technically yes, but the free usage equated to single-digit messages per day before the auto-downgrade. With GPT-5 it was just 1 message per day.

Perhaps I should have said "proper access".

Comment by aryehof 46 minutes ago

For me on a paid plan, the effort indicator was hidden and the model was 5.5 instant. I had to press the + button to select “think harder” before the dial that allowed Sol medium or high to be selected to show.

It made me wonder how many paid subscribers realize they are using the same 5.5 instant model as free users by default. A dark pattern or oversight?

Comment by maxipoo 21 minutes ago

How many can tell the difference?

Comment by firasd 9 hours ago

I think it’s a misread to think the default ChatGPT model switching to GPT 5.6 Luna is some sort of desperation move. Keep in mind that Claude .ai never had this extreme stratification between the frontier models and the free tier (Sonnet is available to free users with rate limits).

So 5.6 Luna is just their next version of what they used to call 5.5 instant tier

And 5.x instant models were never much to write home about anyway so the default ChatGPT free model hasn’t been particularly distinctive since 4o

Comment by freakynit 1 hour ago

Claude's rate limits are absolutely shit for free users. 3 chats and its gone for 24 hours.

Comment by ElijahLynn 9 hours ago

I can't wait to never see a reasoning button ever again. Why do I have to reason about what reasoning level to use?

Comment by miki123211 5 hours ago

I have the opposite problem. I'm not well-calibrated on when I'd want lower reasoning than what's available to me (and how to compare that to lower-tier models). OpenAI now has Luna, Terra and Sol, each at Low, Medium, High and Xhigh, with Pro/Ultra depending on harness and plan. That's ~15 possible combinations of model and reasoning level, and there isn't a satisfactory explanation of which one you want for any particular task.

I feel that work is basically split into two tiers, hard (which requires a good model and lots of reasoning by definition) and relatively easy (which won't consume much of my limits despite a great model and reasoning, so I may just as well keep it on Sol High).

Comment by majormajor 3 hours ago

> (which won't consume much of my limits despite a great model and reasoning, so I may just as well keep it on Sol High)

This equation significantly changes if you're paying API prices vs on a subscription. (Such as if you're integrating it into a different product, where it becomes worth it to figure out what the cheapest you can leverage is.)

Comment by redox99 4 hours ago

Yeah, it's hard, there's so many permutations. But most are bad so it narrows it down.

Luna: Can be useful if price sensitive, always use with AT LEAST high effort. But codex plans are very generous, so just ignore it.

Terra: Forget it exists

Sol: Just use this. Medium can work for specific edits. Otherwise just use high or xhigh.

OpenAI basically agrees with this, and the slider gives you those options.

TL;DR: Just use sol medium/high/xhigh

Comment by drivebyhooting 4 hours ago

Why not pro/ultra?

Comment by redox99 4 hours ago

Pro: It's web chat only, I haven't tried it so idk. I think it's useful for Math and that kind of stuff, but I only do programming.

Ultra: Might be useful, the one time I tried it, it was extremely wasteful in terms of tokens. Definitely not a daily driver.

There's also max effort, I think it can be useful but the gains compared to xhigh are quite small.

I think max and ultra are only worth it when the others fail.

Comment by drivebyhooting 4 hours ago

It’s very confusing to me. I’ve occasionally used pro to do high-level research and design. Then I ask it to create a prompt for Codex ultra. Ultra can do a lot of genetic benchmarking and testing to elucidate and resolve quandaries.

I don’t know if this is a good workflow.

Comment by nojs 6 hours ago

Auto-effort and similarly auto model routing suffer from a halting problem sort of issue: you don’t reliably know if a request is complex unless you use a complex model to make the decision.

Comment by skybrian 9 hours ago

Some people want quick results. Some people want it to keep searching for a new math proof overnight without giving up, and they have money to burn.

It seems like giving it a time limit or a budget in dollars would be clearer, though?

Or, keep searching until I come back to the computer and ask about progress.

Comment by pllbnk 9 hours ago

The _Intelligence_ part of AGI should be able to guide the user through that without all the knobs.

Comment by minimaxir 9 hours ago

OpenAI tried auto-routing with the initial GPT-5 release and it was immediately clear why that was a bad idea.

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by vanuatu 9 hours ago

intelligence is not omniscience though

Comment by stymaar 7 hours ago

Asking questions to clarify user intent is a very low bar for intelligence. A bar that all SOTA models fail consistently at though. (It's both funny and legit infuriating when Opus, after having made a dozen wild assumptions without checking with you, then comes back with a request for clarification on some mundane topic).

Comment by vanuatu 4 hours ago

but you can keep asking questions ad infinitum

very nontrivial problem knowing when to stop and making assumptions

Comment by dbbk 6 hours ago

I don't understand this at all. Whenever I ask Gemini 3.1 Pro Extended, or Claude 5 Max something in chat, the most I ever wait is maybe 30 seconds. Is that really so bad?

Comment by oceanplexian 5 hours ago

"Wait 30 seconds" as a concept has been totally incompatible with the web, smartphones, etc for about 20 years now.

Comment by redox99 9 hours ago

Because the model can't read your mind and know if you want a quick answer, or an hour long deep dive.

Comment by Jtarii 9 hours ago

Then it should just ask the user what they want if its unclear from the context.

Comment by redox99 8 hours ago

So instead of just getting an answer, I have to wait until it asks me, and I have to type back a response? Extremely annoying.

Comment by Marha01 39 minutes ago

How is asking better than a reasoning slider?

Comment by 2sk21 8 hours ago

Exactly! I posted much the same comment in another thread and there were lots of huffy complaints that amounted to "you're prompting it wrong"

Comment by Sammi 8 hours ago

That's what the reasoning slider is for!

Comment by awakeasleep 9 hours ago

Because your incentives are opposed to the provider’s incentives

Comment by timpera 9 hours ago

I think it's nice to be able to make the model reason for dozens of minutes when you want to go deep on a topic, even if the router thinks it's an easy question.

Comment by egorfine 6 hours ago

I absolutely need instant mode as this is what I use 90% of the time.

Sadly it's not available anymore on the updated desktop app (formerly Codex) and the previous desktop app (formerly ChatGPT) is abandoned.

Comment by customguy 4 hours ago

just wait for the loot boxes, mark my words

Comment by ilaksh 9 hours ago

> Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We’re introducing updates to ChatGPT that improve everyday conversations while expanding access for Free users.

This clearly implies that they believe ChatGPT models are AGI and are now willing to say it out loud.

Which I think is a fair interpretation of the term. They are general purpose intelligence in that you can get help from them about almost anything. They are not like narrow single purpose AI models.

I don't think we need that term to mean "can completely emulate a human" or "can do every task any human on earth can do as well as them".

It also needs to be differentiated from ASI with godlike powers many times greater than human.

Comment by orbital-decay 1 hour ago

It doesn't fit their own definition of AGI, although it's inevitably vague [0]:

>artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work

[0] https://openai.com/charter/

Comment by kkoncevicius 9 hours ago

If we could show the current models to someone like Alan Turing, I am sure he would conclude that we have AGI.

Comment by stymaar 7 hours ago

And after half an hour using it he'd just admit that his test was way too simple as these models are still way too dumb

Comment by klibertp 6 hours ago

I think of the Turing test as one of the starting lines, along with image recognition ("a summer break project for a group of grad students" resisted being solved for decades).

It is a huge leap. Now we can start talking about "intelligence" at all - we really couldn't before. That we're still hovering barely above the starting line is a separate matter (also worth noting, of course).

Comment by stavros 4 hours ago

How are the models too dumb? How are they dumber than the average person? I wonder if anyone gave Claude an IQ test (the one for humans).

Comment by ilaksh 4 hours ago

Yes there are a few sites with IQ test benchmarks. The frontier models come up around 130 or 140 depending on which model/test.

Comment by stavros 3 hours ago

That tracks, I wonder what the people who say that the models are too dumb expect to see. Miracles?

Comment by hluska 3 hours ago

Dumb is too simplistic, but they sure don’t pass for being human. That would be the intent of a Turing test… not IQ.

Comment by kubb 9 hours ago

> This clearly implies that they believe ChatGPT models are AGI and are now willing to say it out loud.

Well, the models are smart enough to point out why this is wrong.

Comment by lostmsu 2 hours ago

They were trained to do that specifically, don't you think?

Comment by andai 8 hours ago

>It also needs to be differentiated from ASI with godlike powers many times greater than human.

Wasn't there a thread the other day about how very few humans on earth can understand the new math proofs?

Although "with sufficient study" vs "not even with unlimited study" are probably worth distinguishing there.

Comment by ilaksh 7 hours ago

Which brings up another point in that we should have a term that distinguished between super intelligence in some capacity and godlike super intelligence.

Comment by taytus 7 hours ago

"This clearly implies that they believe ChatGPT models are AGI and are now willing to say it out loud."

I cannot believe the comments I read on HN nowadays. ZERO critical thinking.

Comment by lukevp 4 hours ago

Well your comment adds no value and is just offensive. Why don’t you argue a counterpoint?

Comment by 48 minutes ago

Comment by 1saadcodes 1 hour ago

I dont get why they'd make this available to free users when they're probably dealing with compute constraints considering their competition with the Chinese models. Giving a more capable model to a huge free user base looks like an expensive choice to me

Comment by freakynit 1 hour ago

They've probbaly have realized that the foundation models are becoming commoditized (or will be very soon). We can already run luna medium class models on phones now (bonsai, gemma4).

The value is shifting up the stack... make core intelligence free, then monetize the ecosystem built on top of it .. kinda similar to how the internet itself is free, but platforms and apps capture the value.

I think we'll see a huge push towards connectors for work and personal tools, along with much deeper os level integration. That's where the long-term moat is, not the base model itself.

Comment by judge2020 1 hour ago

IMO Competition with chinese models frees up higher-turn and bigger-context tasks, since SWEs are more likely to use model routers for coding. Thinking may be a few more steps but the problems are a lot less complex and probably 1/10th the context size, even when skills and memory are at play.

Comment by colingauvin 10 hours ago

They must really be feeling the commoditization pressure. I'm not sure what the way out of this is, ChatGPT and Claude are still good products, but they are not necessarily premium products anymore.

I expect a few things to happen in the next year:

1) Exclusive MCP server deals/API integrations

2) Significant switch to B2B marketing, even moreso than we've seen before, with API interfaces being paid and chat-client interfaces becoming more and more free, perhaps just with limits more on integrations or data visualization/analysis

3) US restrictions on B2B contracts with non-US hosted models that do any sort of contracting with the government

Obviously there's a bunch of stuff I'm not foreseeing. But it really does feel like the bottom of the market is collapsing into free. I assume OpenAI and Anthropic think their next generation of models will restore their halo tier status and that the cash burn is justified to just get there, but this has to really mess up IPO plans.

Comment by redox99 9 hours ago

I'm not sure I agree

1) Back then, even as a free user you'd be able to use the strongest model (even if with tight limits). Now, you need to pay to use Sol, and you need to pay to use Opus or Fable. It does seem fairly premium in that sense. Idk about 5.6 Luna, but the previous Instant was really bad, even for very casual users. It would hallucinate non stop.

2) When $100 and $200 per month plans launched, they were received as outrageous even here. Nowadays they are pretty common among power users.

Comment by user43928 8 hours ago

I also scoffed at the ChatGPT $200 Pro plan back then.

Back when coding for me still meant copy-paste from the web version, it was only worth the $20/month for me.

They only added the $100 Pro plan in April during GPT 5.4 times.

Today I happily pay $400/month for Codex and Claude Code.

Comment by thejazzman 5 hours ago

Don’t say the last part out loud or it will be $800.

Comment by colingauvin 9 hours ago

>1) Back then, even as a free user you'd be able to use the strongest model (even if with tight limits). Now, you need to pay to use Sol, and you need to pay to use Opus or Fable. It does seem fairly premium in that sense. Idk about 5.6 Luna, but the previous Instant was really bad, even for very casual users. It would hallucinate non stop.

This is kind of what I'm saying though. Bottom has fallen out, differentiation is just can you be much more premium than the competition. Currently that remains unanswered.

EDIT: I'm basing this off the assumption that for chat, premium is not a point of differentiation at all. For coding/analysis, it is.

Comment by davidguetta 8 hours ago

especially when 99% tasks don't need fable, and certainly not the next model

Comment by kingstnap 9 hours ago

Its always fun to try to read between the lines here to speculate why they are doing this.

Maybe Luna efficiency gain was actually significant enough that putting all the free users and giving them super generous limits makes sense.

They might be doing this to improve the messaging of AI among causal users since right now there is a huge amount of datacenter backlash in the US due to AI grievances.

Maybe they have too much excess capacity or they really want to juice token numbers and market share on their dashboards for marketing.

I also wonder if being given access to an actually a decent model like luna with actual thinking budget instead of brainless "instant" modes will start to make causal users understand the real capabilities of these models.

Comment by planb 8 hours ago

Let’s speculate: they want luna to be their first model “on silicon” and need as much test data as possible before finalizing the design.

Comment by deanc 9 hours ago

It's also going to be more training data for them.

Comment by ToValueFunfetti 9 hours ago

Is this new behavior from them? I haven't looked at their free chat offering in a minute, but I thought they always had them close behind paid tier, often with essentially equal products that made it weird for them to sell the paid tier for chat.

Comment by mkozlows 9 hours ago

No, free tier was total garbage with GPT-5.

Comment by kingstnap 9 hours ago

You can't even pick 5.6 luna on the chat app with a paid subscription. It just gives you sol (or use older models) with what seems like basically as much usage as you want. And sol is considerably smarter than luna.

All of this is of pretty minor importance though. You can't read as many tokens as a subcription can produce so more chat is not the value add nor super important.

I mean there are literally so many providers for free chat if you are willing to use several seperate apps.

The real value in these subs is using codex cli, much like the real point of anthropic subs is using claude code. Because agentic work actually does require a lot of tokens.

Comment by simianwords 9 hours ago

> Maybe Luna efficiency gain was actually significant enough that putting all the free users and giving them super generous limits makes sense.

Definitely this. The recent 80% discount was a reaction to Deepseek's update so that they still position near the frontier. My theory: Luna has always had a much higher efficiency. You do know that the model didn't get faster after the discount?

Comment by simonw 9 hours ago

Nothing in the ChatGPT model release notes yet: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9624314-model-release-no...

(This is a subtle nudge at anyone from OpenAI who reads this to make sure they get updated.)

OpenAI have a model called "chat-latest" - I wonder if that's running this new model yet: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/chat-latest

It's described as "points to the latest Instant model currently used in ChatGPT" - so presumably that's "GPT-5.6 Instant" in the app.

Comment by firasd 8 hours ago

There’s no 5.6 instant I think — 5.6 Luna is gonna be the new instant tier model

Comment by simonw 8 hours ago

No, Luna is the new free model.

https://gist.github.com/simonw/aae4febd3c6f7bc5b7811857edb3c... has screenshots that still show "Instant" as an option for ChatGPT Chat... but not for ChatGPT Work.

Comment by firasd 8 hours ago

Hmm

It’s hard to understand this .. like sure we can select instant but is there an actual model called 5.6 instant? Like is it on LM Arena and OpenRouter or available via API etc

5.5 instant is definitely A Thing it’s even name checked in this OAI post

Comment by simonw 7 hours ago

It's SO hard to understand this. I couldn't confidently explain it at all.

Comment by hluska 3 hours ago

It’s not subtle when you point it out - you’re looking for a different phrase entirely.

Comment by tosh 10 hours ago

free unlimited luna is a pretty badass move

luna is very good

Comment by timpera 9 hours ago

Any improvement to the ChatGPT free plan is really nice. It's easy to forget that most people have never used a SOTA model, and only think of their experience with GPT-4o or Google Search's AI Overviews when asked about AI.

Comment by skybrian 9 hours ago

It's also pretty cheap if you're paying for it (for coding). But I don't quite trust it for anything complicated, so I often use Terra.

Comment by redox99 9 hours ago

Terra is awful and not cheap enough to make up for it. I'd suggest using luna or sol.

Comment by stuartq 8 hours ago

Terra is far from awful. I've not used Luna enough to judge whether it's significantly better than Luna, but at least via GitHub Copilot, Terra is leaps ahead of Sonnet 5.

Comment by Sammi 8 hours ago

So Luna is more awful but it's OK because it's cheaper?

Comment by LaurensBER 7 hours ago

I've had great success with using Luna and having DeepSeek 4 Flash check Luna's output. Oh My Pi has a mode built-in that does this automatically ("advisor" mode). Deepseek only interrupts when it spots an issue so it doesn't slow Luna down.

Both models are cheap enough that I can run 4 sessions at the same time without running out of the 20 USD codex and 10 USD Opencode plan. I've burned through almost a billion tokens this week and I've done some pretty big refactors as well.

I have a Claude Max subscription but I've barely been using it because of the many issues they've had this week.

Comment by dannyw 3 hours ago

Yes, in the same way a basic, dry hotdog at $5 is bad, but I could love it in $0.50.

Pricing absolutely matters.

Comment by redox99 7 hours ago

Yes. You're better off running Luna Max or Sol Medium and never touching Terra.

Comment by causal 9 hours ago

I guess I should give it another shot because I had pretty bad experience with Luna when it first came out. Stuff Sonnet knew better.

Comment by msq22 9 hours ago

Were free users subject to some limits? I've never run into any limits.

Comment by timpera 9 hours ago

It used to be 10 messages every 5 hours using GPT-5, then unlimited 4o-mini. More recently, it went down to ~5 messages per day on 5.5 Instant, then unlimited on 5.5 mini.

Comment by kaszanka 3 hours ago

> Because this version of GPT‑5.6 Sol is optimized for everyday chats, it will only be available in the Chat experience in ChatGPT. The version of GPT‑5.6 Sol that powers Work and Codex is not changing as part of this release.

Hm, does this mean that 5.6 Pro in ChatGPT web is somehow different/not as good now? I found it really good for code review (upload your repo and patch and off it goes).

Comment by roytam87 2 hours ago

OpenAI should be more transparent to (free) users about Data Analysis quota and Chat with attachment quota.

Comment by saithound 7 hours ago

While their math results are impressive, vibe coding their own web UIs with their subpar design models is really going to backfire if their plan is to attract new users with better free model offerings.

The Aug 6 update has forced the entry box to auto-format Markdown in an attempt to imitate Claude. The implementation is buggy and even simple copy-and-paste has gone entirely haywire. They also forgot to leave a switch to turn the confounded autoformatting thing off.

Chat mode in general is currently crawling with more UX bugs than a porch screen in summer.

Comment by kgeist 7 hours ago

>avoid extra detail when it does not help

I wonder if they actually do it to optimize inference. I maintain a corporate AI server and one of the tricks to reduce the load was to modify the system prompt to be as terse as possible so the average response completes faster and requests queue up less often.

Comment by johnnyApplePRNG 3 hours ago

Excellent.

Yes, please give free users more access and leave paying codex users in the dust.

Wise plan, Sam.

Comment by sunaookami 8 hours ago

This is actually a downgrade for free users since currently it uses GPT-5.5 for a few messages before it drops you down to GPT-5.5-mini. Now it always uses a model worse than Mini (Luna is nano-equivalent, "It roughly corresponds to the nano model tier used in earlier GPT-5 families." https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.6-luna ). I guess it's a bit better with Thinking though. They should use Terra for a few messages first before dropping down to Luna. And image inputs are still limited.

Comment by OsamaJaber 8 hours ago

Expanding free access is mostly an inference cost

Serving cheaply at that scale means routing, batching, and cache hits, not a better model :D

Comment by applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago

My mission is world conquest. I'm writing a comment on an HN thread.

No, those two clauses have no relation whatsoever. I just felt like saying the first sentence because it sounded cool.

Comment by Squarex 8 hours ago

Why pay for ChatGPT Go then?

Comment by HDBaseT 5 hours ago

Access to "ChatGPT-Image-2" I suppose?

Comment by ignoramous 10 hours ago

  Every week, 1 billion people turn to ChatGPT for everything from quick questions and web searches to planning, research, advice, and complex decisions.

Guess, Google's AI Mode is chipping away at their consumers (I know I haven't used Chat in a long, long while for 'quick questions and web searches' after OpenAI did away with "think" which I always use). The money-minting office & coding market Anthropic has cornered is hyper-competitive at both the frontier & low-cost ends. OpenAI is reactive [0] and seems right up against it, despite the strength of its excellent models.

[0] Won't put it past OpenAI (and/or Google) to open weight larger models!

Comment by skybrian 9 hours ago

$20/month also gives you API access for coding, in any coding agent. I keep hitting the weekly limit but it's a good deal while it lasts.

Comment by drivebyhooting 9 hours ago

Google’s AI has been very glitchy for me lately. I used to reserve chatGPT for serious work and Gemini for daily personalized unimportant things. But now I switched completely to ChatGPT and resigned myself to their memories/personalization.

Comment by sk4rekr0w 2 hours ago

You've jumped to a naive conclusion

Comment by porridgeraisin 9 hours ago

Did they do away with think? I think now you have to do it with /think

Comment by iJohnDoe 55 minutes ago

> For Plus and Pro users, we’re updating GPT‑5.6 Sol in Chat to be more reliable with facts and provide more focused answers.

I was not impressed with 5.6 and this hits exactly why.

Also, this instant, medium, and high slider situation we now have everywhere is batshit crazy. It’s a major step back in technology.

I’ll put money on the table there will be a surprise in revenue because users have no clue what to choose, so they are constantly choosing high because they don’t want to risk getting inaccurate answers. If this was intentional by the dark patterns department, then brilliant. However, I’m guessing Anthropic and OpenAI are struggling to know how to deploy their models.

Also, the models were already amazing. They need to slow down and do a model release once a year and only do extremely minor iterations instead. Some amazing things are accomplished, but how people actually want to utilize the models gets screwed up every time in the process.

Comment by simianwords 9 hours ago

Does 5.6 Sol finally have an "instant" form? Is that the change?

Comment by 9 hours ago

Comment by redox99 9 hours ago

Yes

Comment by jauntywundrkind 10 hours ago

At first I thought the Sol updates was perhaps trying to help with some complaints of Sol burning through tokens, complaints that have prompted some new data points on https://codex-resets.com/ .

But seeing the graphic with the visual weather report: that makes me think that is not the goal at all. :)

Comment by laweijfmvo 9 hours ago

What a bizarre example of a more direct answer. Any human would simply say “No, it doesn’t rain here in summer.”

Even after identifying the 0% chance of rain, it still drags the conversation on and on and on

Comment by taikahessu 9 hours ago

Would you like to know more? Seriously though, of course, it's tuned for maximum engagement, not maximum efficiency. I wonder how long this engagement dopamine circus can last... too long apparently.

Comment by sunaookami 8 hours ago

GPT models were RLHF'd to death, they will never give a final, direct answer. Every release since the GPT-4o catastrophy is like this, it's so tiresome. They need a complete reset before it can become actually usable again. Or not as maximum engagement seems to be their goal.

Comment by aniceperson 9 hours ago

a m-dash in the title? whoa things are degrading fast

Comment by porridgeraisin 9 hours ago

I dont pay for a chatgpt subscription, but sometimes I did use the web app for throwaway questions. GPT 5.5 Instant or whatever it was that they had was absolutely horrendous. Never answered a question straight and was pedantic in a way even a redditor wouldn't be. So I dropped it and just opened my paid coding agent for everything. Grok.com is quite good now with grok 4.5 though and I find myself using that often. Hopefully luna will be similar.