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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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’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.
I'm running out of excuses not to build a proper comparison site though. Maybe I'll have Astra do rhat.
Reminded me of https://clocks.brianmoore.com/
I'm wondering if this is being trained on by the models today.
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
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.
It's more "correct" but looks a lot worse in my opinion:
https://aibenchy.com/compare/openai-gpt-6-astra-high/google-...
https://aibenchy.com/showcase/?page=2#showcase=67fc6d6c8e4c3...
https://aibenchy.com/showcase/?page=3#showcase=c215b5c915da6...
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/
Edit: nevermind it JUST gave me a notification to use it!
Yeah, when I saw that Tweet I knew the person was saying it because they knew it'll be available within 24h.
I'm a Business plan user with Cyber verification enabled, FWIW.
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.
Do Azure offer something that simply hitting the OpenAI endpoint doesn't provide?