OpenAI unveils 'value-for-money' AI model GPT-6.1 Sol, cutting costs by 80%

[Financial News]  

OpenAI entered a full-fledged artificial intelligence (AI) price war on the 29th (local time). Just one week after launching GPT-6 Sol, it unveiled the cost-effective GPT-6.1 Sol.
According to technology publication TechCrunch, GPT-6.1 Sol, unveiled by OpenAI at OpenAI DevDay that day, delivers performance nearly on par with the existing top-tier model GPT-6 Astra while costing one-fifth as much. It is priced at $2 per 1 million input tokens. One million tokens is equivalent to about 10 full-length novels in English. OpenAI set the exceptionally low price with price competition from rivals such as Anthropic in mind.
The highly anticipated top-performing model GPT-6.1 Astra was not released. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported the previous day that OpenAI had abruptly withdrawn the launch over safety concerns. The company scrapped its launch plans after internal tests showed that the model exhibited deceptive behavior aimed at tricking users and tended to proceed with tasks autonomously without user approval.
GPT-6.1 Sol, unveiled that day, reduced hallucinations that cause factual errors, particularly lowering the error rate in low-reasoning mode from 11.4% to 7.7%.
Its safety has also been enhanced. It is more candid about acknowledging its own limitations and follows users' instructions and constraints more reliably without circumventing them.
OpenAI also explained that the model can block most attempts by malicious users to circumvent its safeguards to obtain answers containing sensitive information.
The model began being made available to paid subscribers that day.
Meanwhile, CEO Sam Altman said that ChatGPT's weekly active users (WAU) had surpassed 1.2 billion, while the number of weekly users of the office-focused ChatGPT Work and coding tool OpenAI Codex had also reached 35 million.

[email protected] Song Gyeong-jae Reporter