OpenAI releases GPT-6.1 Terra: half the price of Sol 6.1, but Hacker News commenters flag a weak Terminal Bench 4.0 result
Summarized from the Hacker News discussion because the article couldn't be read
- Commenters reading the release charts say GPT-6.1 Terra lands near GPT-6-Astra at a fraction of the cost and is neck and neck with 6.1-Sol, while others warn OpenAI likely picked the benchmarks where Terra looks best against those models.
- On Terminal Bench 4.0, commenters report that Terra needs xhigh effort to come close to 6.1 Sol and costs more than Sol at low effort while scoring slightly worse.
- Commenters describe a 75% price cut trajectory carried over from GPT-5.6 Sol to GPT-6.1 Sol, with Terra still at half the price of Sol and priced at 1/5/0.05 in one commenter's reading of the table.
- Commenters say the lineup is Luna, Terra, Sol and Astra in rising price order, and that discontinuing Terra and then reintroducing it as a 6.1 release made the naming hard to follow.
- One commenter claims the cost-per-task framing followed a roughly 50% cut in plan usage and cites a SemiAnalysis newsletter arguing Anthropic plans now give about 5x the value.
Hacker News opinions
Wow, if those charts hold up this basically matches GPT-6-Astra for a fraction of the cost and it's neck and neck with 6.1-Sol.
Careful, they probably picked the benchmarks where Terra looks good against those models. Every release these days highlights its own best numbers. Wait for the full suite.
First chart looks great, but Terminal Bench 4.0 is rough. It needs xhigh to get near 6.1 Sol and costs more for a slightly worse result.
People keep begging OpenAI for something as good as Opus 5.5 and we get this instead. Curious strategy.
Taking the article's numbers at face value, this is about on par with Opus 5.5 for a quarter of the price.
The cost-per-task angle is a weaselly way to sound like they didn't just double the cost for most users. They cut plan usage by around 50% and Anthropic gives about 5x the value on its plans now, so they invented a metric where task means whatever they need it to mean.
I actually like the focus on cost per task. Frontier intelligence next, please. Astra 6.1 when?
If this were half the price I'd be interested, but at 1/5/0.05 it feels like a panic release because Astra 6.1 isn't out the door yet.
Terra is still a weird middle child between Luna, which got a lot better, and Sol, which got a lot cheaper. Same 75% price cut trajectory as GPT-5.6 Sol to 6.1 Sol.
I don't think devs are the audience here. This is for computer work, automation and technical writing.
The naming is a mess now. Luna small, Terra medium, Sol big, Astra bigger, then Sol 6.1 beat Astra in places and they killed Terra, and now Terra is back as a 6.1.
It's not that confusing. Four models, price goes up each level, and a newer smaller model can beat an older bigger one at some tasks. That's expected.
Benchmarks are saturated anyway, the Terra curves are basically stuck to the axes.
They don't have anything competitive with Opus 5.5 yet. There's a rumored model called Bel later this year, and my bet is Fable 5.5 is the next real jump.