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...

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Looked to me like it missed the chain though.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Haiku the GOAT

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

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.

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

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

> Biking is almost always accompanied by helmets

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

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

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

Luna's price seems off

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are we supposed to know if Astra is frontier without the pelican?

It's simonw. It's interesting to see their pelican benchmark, another comment by a different author elsewhere here shows some very good SVG generation too.

It's absolutely related.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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-...

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

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...

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/

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

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

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

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

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!

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

> 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

is Azure for this actually ZDR?

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?

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.

They’re ZDR and the OAI ones aren’t

WTHIT?

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

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

I got it, but sadly no resets...

You made an account just to post this?

Invoking simonw for pelicans pretty please.

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

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