I really don't like having to open Work sessions for one-off questions, only because they're limiting what models they put in the chat. The older models are just too dumb for some things.
The whole Work/Chat/Codex split is maddening in the way it's implemented. It's a pain to switch back to the right project, it's a pain to switch forward, it's a pain to try to remember which chat was in what.
I’ve hit model not available limits for GPT 6.1 Sol multiple times over the last week. It’s never for very long, and I can switch to Astra, but it seems like OpenAI is struggling with capacity. This has happened with my personal $200 Pro connection and my Codex enterprise connection.
I had a codex session stop in the middle because the auto-reviewer timed out with something like "auto-review not available at the moment". The capacity issues are very clearly observable since gpt6-astra launched.
6.1 is Astra minor. Way more capable but also way heavier+slower. Its really 2 different models, they just shipped it as sol to recover from the gpt6 disaster lunch, where they tried to pass terra 6(or a cheaper model) as sol but it was worse than expected
Anecdotally this is what I experienced, do you have sources for this?
It's purely circumstantial, but 6 Sol supports no reasoning (same as 6 Luna and 5.6 Sol/Luna), while both Astra and 6.1 Sol do not support "reasoning = none".
gpt-6.1-sol was released 7 days after gpt-6-sol only because they were bleeding to fable-5.1/opus-5.5 from Anthropic. It was a desperation move and certainly ate into their margins massively. Since their margins on gpt-6.1-sol are much slimmer than on gpt-6-sol they have to use it somehow to preserve compute and make profit. Frankly I think OpenAI is a mess and is playing catch-up with Anthropic… I don’t know how they will recover.
Given the extreme short time between 6 Sol and 6.1 Sol, I suspect they don’t actually have much in common and 6.1 is a heavier model rebranded as Sol in a panic response to poor agentic capabilities of 6.
I suspect that 6 sol was a better version of 5.6 terra (and note that in the 6 sol and luna release, they took out terra, and price 6 sol at 5.6 terra pricing), then the backlash from lesser capabilities made them roll out 6.1 sol as the actual 5.6 sol - size modee.