[HN Gopher] Improving GPT-5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT-5.6 ...
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Improving GPT-5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT-5.6 Luna access for
free users
Author : tedsanders
Score : 132 points
Date : 2026-08-06 17:02 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| tosh wrote:
| free unlimited luna is a pretty badass move
|
| luna is very good
| skybrian wrote:
| It's also pretty cheap if you're paying for it (for coding).
| But I don't quite trust it for anything complicated, so I often
| use Terra.
| redox99 wrote:
| Terra is awful and not cheap enough to make up for it. I'd
| suggest using luna or sol.
| Sammi wrote:
| So Luna is more awful but it's OK because it's cheaper?
| redox99 wrote:
| Yes. You're better off running Luna Max or Sol Medium and
| never touching Terra.
| LaurensBER wrote:
| I've had great success with using Luna and having
| DeepSeek 4 Flash check Luna's output. Oh My Pi has a mode
| built-in that does this automatically ("advisor" mode).
| Deepseek only interrupts when it spots an issue so it
| doesn't slow Luna down.
|
| Both models are cheap enough that I can run 4 sessions at
| the same time without running out of the 20 USD codex and
| 10 USD Opencode plan. I've burned through almost a
| billion tokens this week and I've done some pretty big
| refactors as well.
|
| I have a Claude Max subscription but I've barely been
| using it because of the many issues they've had this
| week.
| stuartq wrote:
| Terra is far from awful. I've not used Luna enough to judge
| whether it's significantly better than Luna, but at least
| via GitHub Copilot, Terra is leaps ahead of Sonnet 5.
| causal wrote:
| I guess I should give it another shot because I had pretty bad
| experience with Luna when it first came out. Stuff Sonnet knew
| better.
| timpera wrote:
| Any improvement to the ChatGPT free plan is really nice. It's
| easy to forget that most people have never used a SOTA model,
| and only think of their experience with GPT-4o or Google
| Search's AI Overviews when asked about AI.
| msq22 wrote:
| Were free users subject to some limits? I've never run into any
| limits.
| timpera wrote:
| It used to be 10 messages every 5 hours using GPT-5, then
| unlimited 4o-mini. More recently, it went down to ~5 messages
| per day on 5.5 Instant, then unlimited on 5.5 mini.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| At first I thought the Sol updates was perhaps trying to help
| with some complaints of Sol burning through tokens, complaints
| that have prompted some new data points on https://codex-
| resets.com/ .
|
| But seeing the graphic with the visual weather report: that makes
| me think that is not the goal at all. :)
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| What a bizarre example of a more direct answer. Any human would
| simply say "No, it doesn't rain here in summer."
|
| Even after identifying the 0% chance of rain, it still drags
| the conversation on and on and on
| taikahessu wrote:
| Would you like to know more? Seriously though, of course,
| it's tuned for maximum engagement, not maximum efficiency. I
| wonder how long this engagement dopamine circus can last...
| too long apparently.
| sunaookami wrote:
| GPT models were RLHF'd to death, they will never give a
| final, direct answer. Every release since the GPT-4o
| catastrophy is like this, it's so tiresome. They need a
| complete reset before it can become actually usable again. Or
| not as maximum engagement seems to be their goal.
| colingauvin wrote:
| They must really be feeling the commoditization pressure. I'm not
| sure what the way out of this is, ChatGPT and Claude are still
| good products, but they are not necessarily premium products
| anymore.
|
| I expect a few things to happen in the next year:
|
| 1) Exclusive MCP server deals/API integrations
|
| 2) Significant switch to B2B marketing, even moreso than we've
| seen before, with API interfaces being paid and chat-client
| interfaces becoming more and more free, perhaps just with limits
| more on integrations or data visualization/analysis
|
| 3) US restrictions on B2B contracts with non-US hosted models
| that do any sort of contracting with the government
|
| Obviously there's a bunch of stuff I'm not foreseeing. But it
| really does feel like the bottom of the market is collapsing into
| free. I assume OpenAI and Anthropic think their next generation
| of models will restore their halo tier status and that the cash
| burn is justified to just get there, but this has to really mess
| up IPO plans.
| redox99 wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree
|
| 1) Back then, even as a free user you'd be able to use the
| strongest model (even if with tight limits). Now, you _need_ to
| pay to use Sol, and you _need_ to pay to use Opus or Fable. It
| does seem fairly premium in that sense. Idk about 5.6 Luna, but
| the previous Instant was really bad, even for very casual
| users. It would hallucinate non stop.
|
| 2) When $100 and $200 per month plans launched, they were
| received as outrageous even here. Nowadays they are pretty
| common among power users.
| colingauvin wrote:
| >1) Back then, even as a free user you'd be able to use the
| strongest model (even if with tight limits). Now, you need to
| pay to use Sol, and you need to pay to use Opus or Fable. It
| does seem fairly premium in that sense. Idk about 5.6 Luna,
| but the previous Instant was really bad, even for very casual
| users. It would hallucinate non stop.
|
| This is kind of what I'm saying though. Bottom has fallen
| out, differentiation is just can you be much more premium
| than the competition. Currently that remains unanswered.
|
| EDIT: I'm basing this off the assumption that for chat,
| premium is not a point of differentiation at all. For
| coding/analysis, it is.
| davidguetta wrote:
| especially when 99% tasks don't need fable, and certainly
| not the next model
| user43928 wrote:
| I also scoffed at the ChatGPT $200 Pro plan back then.
|
| Back when coding for me still meant copy-paste from the web
| version, it was only worth the $20/month for me.
|
| They only added the $100 Pro plan in April during GPT 5.4
| times.
|
| Today I happily pay $400/month for Codex and Claude Code.
| thejazzman wrote:
| Don't say the last part out loud or it will be $800.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Every week, 1 billion people turn to ChatGPT for everything from
| quick questions and web searches to planning, research, advice,
| and complex decisions.
|
| Guess, Google's _AI Mode_ is chipping away at their consumers (I
| know I haven 't used Chat in a long, long while for 'quick
| questions and web searches' after OpenAI did away with "think"
| which I _always_ use). The money-minting office & coding market
| Anthropic has cornered is hyper-competitive at both the frontier
| & low-cost ends. OpenAI is reactive [0] and seems right up
| against it, despite the strength of its excellent models.
|
| [0] Won't put it past OpenAI (and/or Google) to open weight
| larger models!
| skybrian wrote:
| $20/month also gives you API access for coding, in any coding
| agent. I keep hitting the weekly limit but it's a good deal
| while it lasts.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Did they do away with think? I think now you have to do it with
| /think
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Google's AI has been very glitchy for me lately. I used to
| reserve chatGPT for serious work and Gemini for daily
| personalized unimportant things. But now I switched completely
| to ChatGPT and resigned myself to their
| memories/personalization.
| firasd wrote:
| I think it's a misread to think the default ChatGPT model
| switching to GPT 5.6 Luna is some sort of desperation move. Keep
| in mind that Claude .ai never had this extreme stratification
| between the frontier models and the free tier (Sonnet is
| available to free users with rate limits).
|
| So 5.6 Luna is just their next version of what they used to call
| 5.5 instant tier
|
| And 5.x instant models were never much to write home about anyway
| so the default ChatGPT free model hasn't been particularly
| distinctive since 4o
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| I can't wait to never see a reasoning button ever again. Why do I
| have to reason about what reasoning level to use?
| timpera wrote:
| I think it's nice to be able to make the model reason for
| dozens of minutes when you want to go deep on a topic, even if
| the router thinks it's an easy question.
| skybrian wrote:
| Some people want quick results. Some people want it to keep
| searching for a new math proof overnight without giving up, and
| they have money to burn.
|
| It seems like giving it a time limit or a budget in dollars
| would be clearer, though?
|
| Or, keep searching until I come back to the computer and ask
| about progress.
| pllbnk wrote:
| The _Intelligence_ part of AGI should be able to guide the
| user through that without all the knobs.
| vanuatu wrote:
| intelligence is not omniscience though
| stymaar wrote:
| Asking questions to clarify user intent is a very low bar
| for intelligence. A bar that all SOTA models fail
| consistently at though. (It's both funny and legit
| infuriating when Opus, after having made a dozen wild
| assumptions without checking with you, then comes back
| with a request for clarification on some mundane topic).
| minimaxir wrote:
| OpenAI tried auto-routing with the initial GPT-5 release
| and it was immediately clear why that was a bad idea.
| dbbk wrote:
| I don't understand this at all. Whenever I ask Gemini 3.1 Pro
| Extended, or Claude 5 Max something in chat, the most I ever
| wait is maybe 30 seconds. Is that really so bad?
| oceanplexian wrote:
| "Wait 30 seconds" as a concept has been totally
| incompatible with the web, smartphones, etc for about 20
| years now.
| awakeasleep wrote:
| Because your incentives are opposed to the provider's
| incentives
| redox99 wrote:
| Because the model can't read your mind and know if you want a
| quick answer, or an hour long deep dive.
| Jtarii wrote:
| Then it should just ask the user what they want if its
| unclear from the context.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| Exactly! I posted much the same comment in another thread
| and there were lots of huffy complaints that amounted to
| "you're prompting it wrong"
| Sammi wrote:
| That's what the reasoning slider is for!
| redox99 wrote:
| So instead of just getting an answer, I have to wait until
| it asks me, and I have to type back a response? Extremely
| annoying.
| egorfine wrote:
| I absolutely need instant mode as this is what I use 90% of the
| time.
|
| Sadly it's not available anymore on the updated desktop app
| (formerly Codex) and the previous desktop app (formerly
| ChatGPT) is abandoned.
| nojs wrote:
| Auto-effort and similarly auto model routing suffer from a
| halting problem sort of issue: you don't reliably know if a
| request is complex unless you use a complex model to make the
| decision.
| miki123211 wrote:
| I have the opposite problem. I'm not well-calibrated on when
| I'd want _lower_ reasoning than what 's available to me (and
| how to compare that to lower-tier models). OpenAI now has Luna,
| Terra and Sol, each at Low, Medium, High and Xhigh, with
| Pro/Ultra depending on harness and plan. That's ~15 possible
| combinations of model and reasoning level, and there isn't a
| satisfactory explanation of which one you want for any
| particular task.
|
| I feel that work is basically split into two tiers, hard (which
| requires a good model and lots of reasoning by definition) and
| relatively easy (which won't consume much of my limits despite
| a great model and reasoning, so I may just as well keep it on
| Sol High).
| kingstnap wrote:
| Its always fun to try to read between the lines here to speculate
| why they are doing this.
|
| Maybe Luna efficiency gain was actually significant enough that
| putting all the free users and giving them super generous limits
| makes sense.
|
| They might be doing this to improve the messaging of AI among
| causal users since right now there is a huge amount of datacenter
| backlash in the US due to AI grievances.
|
| Maybe they have too much excess capacity or they really want to
| juice token numbers and market share on their dashboards for
| marketing.
|
| I also wonder if being given access to an actually a decent model
| like luna with actual thinking budget instead of brainless
| "instant" modes will start to make causal users understand the
| real capabilities of these models.
| deanc wrote:
| It's also going to be more training data for them.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| Is this new behavior from them? I haven't looked at their free
| chat offering in a minute, but I thought they always had them
| close behind paid tier, often with essentially equal products
| that made it weird for them to sell the paid tier for chat.
| mkozlows wrote:
| No, free tier was total garbage with GPT-5.
| kingstnap wrote:
| You can't even pick 5.6 luna on the chat app with a paid
| subscription. It just gives you sol (or use older models)
| with what seems like basically as much usage as you want. And
| sol is considerably smarter than luna.
|
| All of this is of pretty minor importance though. You can't
| read as many tokens as a subcription can produce so more chat
| is not the value add nor super important.
|
| I mean there are literally so many providers for free chat if
| you are willing to use several seperate apps.
|
| The real value in these subs is using codex cli, much like
| the real point of anthropic subs is using claude code.
| Because agentic work actually does require a lot of tokens.
| simianwords wrote:
| > Maybe Luna efficiency gain was actually significant enough
| that putting all the free users and giving them super generous
| limits makes sense.
|
| Definitely this. The recent 80% discount was a reaction to
| Deepseek's update so that they still position near the
| frontier. My theory: Luna has always had a much higher
| efficiency. You do know that the model didn't get faster after
| the discount?
| planb wrote:
| Let's speculate: they want luna to be their first model "on
| silicon" and need as much test data as possible before
| finalizing the design.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| I dont pay for a chatgpt subscription, but sometimes I did use
| the web app for throwaway questions. GPT 5.5 Instant or whatever
| it was that they had was absolutely horrendous. Never answered a
| question straight and was pedantic in a way even a redditor
| wouldn't be. So I dropped it and just opened my paid coding agent
| for everything. Grok.com is quite good now with grok 4.5 though
| and I find myself using that often. Hopefully luna will be
| similar.
| ilaksh wrote:
| > Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence
| benefits all of humanity. We're introducing updates to ChatGPT
| that improve everyday conversations while expanding access for
| Free users.
|
| This clearly implies that they believe ChatGPT models are AGI and
| are now willing to say it out loud.
|
| Which I think is a fair interpretation of the term. They are
| general purpose intelligence in that you can get help from them
| about almost anything. They are not like narrow single purpose AI
| models.
|
| I don't think we need that term to mean "can completely emulate a
| human" or "can do every task any human on earth can do as well as
| them".
|
| It also needs to be differentiated from ASI with godlike powers
| many times greater than human.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| If we could show the current models to someone like Alan
| Turing, I am sure he would conclude that we have AGI.
| stymaar wrote:
| And after half an hour using it he'd just admit that his test
| was way too simple as these models are still way too dumb
| klibertp wrote:
| I think of the Turing test as one of the starting lines,
| along with image recognition ("a summer break project for a
| group of grad students" resisted being solved for decades).
|
| It _is_ a huge leap. Now we can start talking about
| "intelligence" at all - we really couldn't before. That
| we're still hovering barely above the starting line is a
| separate matter (also worth noting, of course).
| kubb wrote:
| > This clearly implies that they believe ChatGPT models are AGI
| and are now willing to say it out loud.
|
| Well, the models are smart enough to point out why this is
| wrong.
| andai wrote:
| >It also needs to be differentiated from ASI with godlike
| powers many times greater than human.
|
| Wasn't there a thread the other day about how very few humans
| on earth can understand the new math proofs?
|
| Although "with sufficient study" vs "not even with unlimited
| study" are probably worth distinguishing there.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Which brings up another point in that we should have a term
| that distinguished between super intelligence in some
| capacity and godlike super intelligence.
| taytus wrote:
| "This clearly implies that they believe ChatGPT models are AGI
| and are now willing to say it out loud."
|
| I cannot believe the comments I read on HN nowadays. ZERO
| critical thinking.
| aniceperson wrote:
| a m-dash in the title? whoa things are degrading fast
| heaney-555 wrote:
| Giving free ChatGPT users access to reasoning (the 'Think'
| toggle) will have a broader impact on the world than every new
| paid model and coding agent combined.
| daemonologist wrote:
| Going from 5.5 Instant (which was _noticeably_ bad) to 5.6 Luna
| is a big jump as well. OpenAI is probably the most prominent
| among the general public - an advantage in some respects but
| they 're giving away a lot of free inference and thus have to
| use a pretty small model to do it.
| johnsmith1840 wrote:
| I really don't see how they're going to be google here. The
| free tier is dominated by verticle integration and the
| platform that people use. Long term I imagine google wins the
| bottom of the market and I'd be suprised if they lost.
| Tostino wrote:
| People tell these models _everything_. You don 't think a
| pretty unethical company can figure out a way to monetize
| that?
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Ads.
| stymaar wrote:
| Ads work when you can server $.01 worth of ads to a user
| for $.0001 of server cost. I fail to see how you can make
| it work when doing LLM inference which is significantly
| costlier than web search.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| In about 4 months, OpenAI's fundraiser decks will leak,
| which will include their current ad revenue.
| kristofferR wrote:
| 90+% of queries are probably so common/evergreen that, if
| a cheaper model made all the different language varients
| and ways of asking the question into one query, they
| could be cached quite effectively.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| I recently saw some discussion about the CPC for personal
| injury lawyers being ~$200 on Google ads. Seems insane to
| me, but I'm totally disconnected from the advertising
| world. That said, depending on the conversion rates
| between chats and clicks, the math could be favorable for
| OAI.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| > I fail to see how you can make it work when doing LLM
| inference which is significantly costlier than web
| search.
|
| The median LLM query isn't significantly costlier than
| web search.
| gavinray wrote:
| I'm not sure people fully comprehend the trickle-down pop-
| culture/zeitgeist effects that LLM's are having/are going to
| have on humanity.
|
| Because everyone now outsources much of their thinking and
| researching to LLM's, our collective culture + brain is shaped
| in a cyclical manner by using them.
|
| It's the mechanical homogenization of culture and groupthink.
| thorum wrote:
| Free users have had access to reasoning for a while. o4-mini
| and the initial GPT-5 launch both included reasoning modes for
| free users.
|
| They took away the button a few months ago and are now putting
| it back.
| heaney-555 wrote:
| Technically yes, but the free usage equated to single-digit
| messages per day before the auto-downgrade. With GPT-5 it was
| just 1 message per day.
|
| Perhaps I should have said "proper access".
| in-silico wrote:
| Does the free tier really not have access to reasoning models?
|
| That would explain a lot of the terrible AI/LLM takes online.
| heaney-555 wrote:
| The free tier of ChatGPT is powered by GPT-5.5 Instant, a
| non-reasoning version of GPT 5.5.
| simianwords wrote:
| Does 5.6 Sol finally have an "instant" form? Is that the change?
| redox99 wrote:
| Yes
| simonw wrote:
| Nothing in the ChatGPT model release notes yet:
| https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9624314-model-release-no...
|
| (This is a subtle nudge at anyone from OpenAI who reads this to
| make sure they get updated.)
|
| OpenAI have a model called "chat-latest" - I wonder if that's
| running this new model yet:
| https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/chat-latest
|
| It's described as "points to the latest Instant model currently
| used in ChatGPT" - so presumably that's "GPT-5.6 Instant" in the
| app.
| firasd wrote:
| There's no 5.6 instant I think -- 5.6 Luna is gonna be the new
| instant tier model
| simonw wrote:
| No, Luna is the new free model.
|
| https://gist.github.com/simonw/aae4febd3c6f7bc5b7811857edb3c.
| .. has screenshots that still show "Instant" as an option for
| ChatGPT Chat... but not for ChatGPT Work.
| firasd wrote:
| Hmm
|
| It's hard to understand this .. like sure we can select
| instant but is there an actual model called 5.6 instant?
| Like is it on LM Arena and OpenRouter or available via API
| etc
|
| 5.5 instant is definitely A Thing it's even name checked in
| this OAI post
| simonw wrote:
| It's SO hard to understand this. I couldn't confidently
| explain it at all.
| OsamaJaber wrote:
| Expanding free access is mostly an inference cost
|
| Serving cheaply at that scale means routing, batching, and cache
| hits, not a better model :D
| Squarex wrote:
| Why pay for ChatGPT Go then?
| sunaookami wrote:
| This is actually a downgrade for free users since currently it
| uses GPT-5.5 for a few messages before it drops you down to
| GPT-5.5-mini. Now it always uses a model worse than Mini (Luna is
| nano-equivalent, "It roughly corresponds to the nano model tier
| used in earlier GPT-5 families."
| https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.6-luna ). I
| guess it's a bit better with Thinking though. They should use
| Terra for a few messages first before dropping down to Luna. And
| image inputs are still limited.
| saithound wrote:
| While their math results are impressive, vibe coding their own
| web UIs with their subpar design models is really going to
| backfire if their plan is to attract new users with better free
| model offerings.
|
| The Aug 6 update has forced the entry box to auto-format Markdown
| in an attempt to imitate Claude. The implementation is buggy and
| even simple copy-and-paste has gone entirely haywire. They also
| forgot to leave a switch to turn the confounded autoformatting
| thing off.
|
| Chat mode in general is currently crawling with more UX bugs than
| a porch screen in summer.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| > Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence
| benefits all of humanity. We're introducing updates to ChatGPT
| that improve everyday conversations while expanding access for
| Free users.
|
| My mission is world conquest. I'm writing a comment on an HN
| thread.
|
| No, those two clauses have no relation whatsoever. I just felt
| like saying the first sentence because it sounded cool.
| kgeist wrote:
| >avoid extra detail when it does not help
|
| I wonder if they actually do it to optimize inference. I maintain
| a corporate AI server and one of the tricks to reduce the load
| was to modify the system prompt to be as terse as possible so the
| average response completes faster and requests queue up less
| often.
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