GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter
295 by Topfi · · openrouter.ai · 219 comments
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
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.
You would not expect the developers of the model to optimize for a well known benchmark?
Your comparison grid is one of the most useful comparison grids I have ever seen in terms of measuring AI.
It feels silly to say that about making a pelican image but it really shows the difference in output and cost in an easy to understand way.
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.
I signed up for OpenRouter, loaded it up with $25, and after running a test prompt immediately had my account suspended. There’s no way to talk to support, emails go nowhere, and their Discord is swarmed with people who also are getting no responses to anything.
I would recommend staying away from OpenRouter. No matter how good the service is, if anything does go wrong, you have no recourse and you lose every credit in your account. Ironically some of the few responses I actually saw in the Discord were doubling down on their “no refunds no matter what” policy.
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.
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.
$10/$50 is incredibly expensive compared to Chinese models which are cents.
I think they’re really going to struggle selling these models long-term. My company is already massively cutting down on access because they’ve realised most people don’t actually produce any value using it. All the tokenmaxers have ruined it for the rest of us now that accounting have seen the costs.
The names, I thought they were going to keep Sol, Terra, Luna for a while (while increasing versions). Are names like Sol and Astra really burned as one-offs? I think that's a waste of a good model name. Hope they keep them going with updates, as nicknames for the various model sizes on offer.
This feels like a genuine step change in AI development. Inline with Dec 2025 release of Opus 4.6.
Where do we go from here??
in the middel of a coding session with 5.6 sol. astra popped up, swapped, asked review, it fixed a few really critical bugs immediately. pretty nice. one around some resource lifetimes in a rendering pipeline which would have been a nightmare to find manually.
almost had the feelin it was watching its little brother fail and had to 'step in' for a moment :').
time to go play outside...
I tried it with some humanities questions and with the default OR system prompt (no prompt?) it seems to be rather mild - lacking usual AI mannerisms. Kinda cool.
Its also available finally to Pro users! Just took 24 hours.
Just got access to it on Plus plan in Australia. 2 Banked resets as well.
The higher price seems less important if it actually gets the job done with fewer tokens. I'm still very worried that this will end up coming back to bite us, by becoming more expensive once they inevitably nerf it. Every major model provider does that now after all
Played in codex app a couple of hours today: it feels much faster than SOL, even if the TPS is half of it.
I was really hoping for Astra to be less expensive then Opus...
Just got it. European plus user here. Only codex, no chatgpt
For those on plus, are you seeing astra limited to medium? Considering the rate limits that probably makes sense, but I'm wondering what different groups have access to.
Odd that the tool call failure rate is so high (5%) for the OpenAI provider than Azure (0.2-0.5%).
I misread the title as GPTA-6, wondering what sort of crazy crossover was happening.
Tangentially related, but Astra generated some of the worst Odin code I’ve ever seen. Turns out AGI is indistinguishable from an Oracle subcontractor who hates tech and hates his job.
According to the metrics the "fast" mode is not any faster...
2× price only wins for review if it catches bugs the cheap model drops — nobody runs that test, everyone quotes the benchmark.
Any tips on using Astra as orchestrator with Luna workers efficiently in codex?
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’m confused. I thought it was being only rolled out to select partners for now?
is Azure for this actually ZDR?
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I have GPT-6 access in Codex and OpenAI API now
I'm a Business plan user with Cyber verification enabled, FWIW.
Threw $10 at this to help me prepare for my league’s fantasy auction this weekend. It spend $3.50 and then said “this action would cause you to go above your spending limit”.
Then I threw $100 for a Codex Max sub and it included Astra and it did it for me.
Sure seems like Astra is expensive AF.
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?
I got it, but sadly no resets...
Damn I am so hyped
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great
Invoking simonw for pelicans pretty please.
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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...