GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter (openrouter.ai)

165 pointsby Topfi7 hours ago84 comments

simonw 6 hours ago

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...

Xunjin 5 hours ago

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.

r_lee 5 hours ago

I have a feeling they've been doing that for a while now, even if unintentional, as it's such a well known benchmark

BrokenCogs 5 hours ago

Interesting that all of the bikes are turquoise colored, except for the medium effort

lspears 5 hours ago

Luna's price seems off

droidjj 4 hours ago

The price is probably coming from when Luna was first released. OpenAI slashed the price by 80% at the end of July.

simonw 4 hours ago

Yes! Good catch, thanks - I'll fix that.

simonw 3 hours ago

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

andai 5 hours ago

Oh my goodness. I was not prepared for Luna on "none".

Reminded me of https://clocks.brianmoore.com/

tyre 4 hours ago

Haiku the GOAT

vb-8448 5 hours ago

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.

thimabi 4 hours ago

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 4 hours ago

Astra is the only model that correctly depicts occlusion of crank and leg, although interestingly, at max and medium levels (not in between).

vessenes 3 hours ago

Looked to me like it missed the chain though.

jsdalton 4 hours ago

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.

simonw 4 hours ago

For the moment the best place to see them all is to browse the tag on my blog - 140 posts now! https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/

I'm running out of excuses not to build a proper comparison site though. Maybe I'll have Astra do rhat.

bahmboo an hour ago

Would be great to spend some money (other people's money) on paying some illustrators and artists to do the same for comparison. It could be straight images converted to SVG or direct vector graphics.

fHr 4 hours ago

Luna is my go to daily model it's great value

ghthor 4 hours ago

Mine as well, it’s fast and keeps me in flow; and cheap!

tuo-lei 3 hours ago

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

bnorton 4 hours ago

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 3 hours ago

But pelicans are almost never accompanied by helmets, so it cancels out.

neutronicus 3 hours ago

At least one reasoning trace I saw considered a helmet and discarded the idea because it was worried about obscuring some detail

sumedh 3 hours ago

> Biking is almost always accompanied by helmets

Isnt Netherlands the leader in bike riders and they dont wear helmets.

kart23 3 hours ago

radial spokes on the back wheel is not a thing irl. i wonder if any model has gotten that right?

petilon 3 hours ago

Astra pelican looks amazing: it looks like it was made by a professional artist. All the others look like they were made by kindergartners.

steve-atx-7600 3 hours ago

You would not expect the developers of the model to optimize for a well known benchmark?

y1n0 3 hours ago

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.

Kranar 3 hours ago

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?

awakeasleep 2 hours ago

You gotta look up how RLHF works before you ask a demanding question like this.

mudkipdev 2 hours ago

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.

mi_lk 3 hours ago

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

benatkin an hour ago

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.

kibae 2 hours ago

There was a HN post that tested this hypothesis a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010129

simonw 40 minutes ago

Here's 'Generate an SVG of a ring-tailed lemur riding an electric scooter' at reasoning level max: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Quote from the thinking trace:

> I’m thinking about how a helmet would obscure lemur ears, but using an electric scooter helmet seems responsible.

It's pretty solid - face is a little wonky but excellent tail and scooter.

CamperBob2 21 minutes ago

If you want to see something brutal, ask for a zebra riding a scooter. I have yet to see any models do a credible job at that.

PacificSpecific an hour ago

Fallen off the homepage so what? I genuinely don't understand

threatripper an hour ago

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.

epihelix 24 minutes ago

Yes, the curve of the front fork on the max pelican was what I noticed also. It's impressive (if not an accident), and a remarkably accurate bike overall. The pelican just needs to raise their seat a little.

CamperBob2 23 minutes ago

Crazy how much the Astra pelicans resemble GLM 5.3's (https://crimson-jeri-74.tiiny.site/), down to the color of the bike and the scarf.

The improved front fork design mentioned by Threatripper is about the only thing Astra is doing better, IMO.

dector 11 minutes ago

Btw, they had 3D pelican-on-the-bicycle easter egg in one of the promo videos: https://youtu.be/bOC3DisEOfg?t=117 so I'm pretty sure that they spent some small amount of resources to train the model to produce good svg version as well. :D

jjcm 2 hours ago

It's ability to handle non-90 degree cutouts and shapes for web dev is one of the best I've seen. The vision model on this is VERY capable.

Here's an image design source of truth: https://image.non.io/78f4cd8b-2560-4643-9a51-96a89171f994.we...

And here's the page it build from it: https://image.non.io/e7d3a9e5-f9df-4fd8-b79f-1f90280f978f.we...

Note the flowing svg lines, and how accurately it recreated them. Here's Opus 5 for comparison - you can really see how while Astra really recreated the flow that was in the original design, opus only got the general vibe: https://image.non.io/dfe13de0-4487-431f-8b69-544ff3030dac.we...

One thing I will say is you are paying for quality. That site build cost $24 - extremely non-trivial for a simple frontend.

XCSme 6 hours ago

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.

embedding-shape 6 hours ago

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 6 hours ago

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 6 hours ago

Do you prefer the fable one?

It's more "correct" but looks a lot worse in my opinion:

https://aibenchy.com/compare/openai-gpt-6-astra-high/google-...

kulahan 5 hours ago

No, both of them look awful. I genuinely am unsure if this is a meme you're making that's going over my head...?

XCSme 5 hours ago

Well, this was the state of SVG generation until a few months ago:

https://aibenchy.com/showcase/?page=2#showcase=67fc6d6c8e4c3...

https://aibenchy.com/showcase/?page=3#showcase=c215b5c915da6...

XCSme 5 hours ago

I've replaced "Score" there with model ranking, to reduce confusion, thanks for the feedback!

satvikpendem 5 hours ago

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.

kulahan 5 hours ago

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 5 hours ago

Sure, it is a bit cartoonish but it’s relatively impressive. I do wonder what you would get if you asked for photorealism

redox99 an hour ago

The problem is not photorealism. The SVG is outright dumb, its on the wrong side of the table, the table has fucked up geometry (its tilted) and many more minor flaws.

dprkh 3 hours ago

I thought all the designers have been using vector graphics for a long time now.

mceachen 2 hours ago

Aldus Freehand 1.0 was released in 1988. Adobe Illustrator was first released in 1987.

readams 4 hours ago

The Astra one looks pretty good except it's standing on the wrong side of the table

kingstnap 7 hours ago

Its also available finally to Pro users! Just took 24 hours.

InsideOutSanta 7 hours ago

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 7 hours ago

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 6 hours ago

That's a pretty genius internal incentive to move fast.

embedding-shape 6 hours ago

> 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.

sumedh 3 hours ago

Just got access to it on Plus plan in Australia. 2 Banked resets as well.

vb-8448 5 hours ago

Played in codex app a couple of hours today: it feels much faster than SOL, even if the TPS is half of it.

algoth1 7 hours ago

Just got it. European plus user here. Only codex, no chatgpt

jaesonaras 4 hours ago

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 7 hours ago

I have GPT-6 access in Codex and OpenAI API now

I'm a Business plan user with Cyber verification enabled, FWIW.

embedding-shape 6 hours ago

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 7 hours ago

is Azure for this actually ZDR?

starik36 6 hours ago

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?

itsjustkev 6 hours ago

Compared to OpenAI flex? I'm pretty sure that is their batch processing endpoint, which is naturally cheaper.

claiir 5 hours ago

They’re ZDR and the OAI ones aren’t

olalonde 4 hours ago

WTHIT?

spdustin 3 hours ago

ZDR = Zero Data Retention — they don't store your inputs/outputs.

hhh 4 hours ago

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.

cute_boi 6 hours ago

I got it, but sadly no resets...

vatsachak 7 hours ago

Damn I am so hyped

6thbit 6 hours ago

Invoking simonw for pelicans pretty please.

drivers99 6 hours ago

That's over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49570643

Osama0456 7 hours ago

is it finally available on openrouter and what about fable 5.1

r_lee 7 hours ago

that's literally what the link is for...