Thread · 8 stories · Jun 13 – Aug 25
Sol, Terra and Luna: a government-vetted preview, then three months of price cuts, tuning and speed modes that turned the family into a commodity.
Jump to timeline ↓GPT-5.6 arrived first as a rumour Jakub Pachocki told staff, then as a preview restricted to about 20 government-vetted organisations. Over the following months OpenAI worked the price and packaging rather than the capability: Luna down 80%, Sol down 20% twice over, free-tier Luna, and a 14x Ultrafast mode running on Cerebras.
OpenRouter's data closed the loop, showing how much of the demand was price and how much was capability.
