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.
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 12 minutes 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.
BrokenCogs 53 minutes ago [-]
Interesting that all of the bikes are turquoise colored, except for the medium effort
andai 24 minutes ago [-]
Oh my goodness. I was not prepared for Luna on "none".
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 17 minutes 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
lspears 39 minutes ago [-]
Luna's price seems off
leoqa 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
satvikpendem 1 hours ago [-]
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.
samuelknight 1 hours ago [-]
How are we supposed to know if Astra is frontier without the pelican?
It took a while to test it, initially OpenRouter was giving Not Found errors for this model ID.
satvikpendem 1 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 34 minutes 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 18 minutes ago [-]
Sure, it is a bit cartoonish but it’s relatively impressive. I do wonder what you would get if you asked for photorealism
embedding-shape 1 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 1 hours ago [-]
Do you prefer the fable one?
It's more "correct" but looks a lot worse in my opinion:
I've replaced "Score" there with model ranking, to reduce confusion, thanks for the feedback!
1 hours ago [-]
jaesonaras 10 minutes 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.
vb-8448 21 minutes ago [-]
Played in codex app a couple of hours today: it feels much faster than SOL, even if the TPS is half of it.
kingstnap 3 hours ago [-]
Its also available finally to Pro users! Just took 24 hours.
InsideOutSanta 2 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
paxys 2 hours ago [-]
That's a pretty genius internal incentive to move fast.
wincy 2 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!
embedding-shape 2 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.
algoth1 2 hours ago [-]
Just got it. European plus user here. Only codex, no chatgpt
2 hours ago [-]
gavinray 2 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 2 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 2 hours ago [-]
is Azure for this actually ZDR?
starik36 2 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?
hhh 9 minutes 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.
claiir 1 hours ago [-]
They’re ZDR and the OAI ones aren’t
paxys 3 minutes ago [-]
OpenAI also has ZDR for enterprise accounts.
itsjustkev 1 hours ago [-]
Compared to OpenAI flex? I'm pretty sure that is their batch processing endpoint, which is naturally cheaper.
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...
Reminded me of https://clocks.brianmoore.com/
I'm wondering if this is being trained on by the models today.
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?