Better Call Sol The Workhorse | Don't Worry About the Vase

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Better Call Sol The Workhorse

Posted on July 13, 2026 by TheZvi

OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol is finally here, along with the cheaper Terra and Luna.

We’ve seen the early hype as reported on Thursday, but as always that is biased.

As usual, the bulk of this is collecting a gestalt based on reactions. I included everything up to a point, but I got a lot of feedback, so after a while I only took the interesting ones.

Sol and Fable are both excellent models, sir. They both represent big moves forward. There is room in your workflow for both of them.

Sol and Fable are very different, especially when considered as part of their respective packages. I’m considering Sol + Codex (or Work) versus Fable + Claude Code (or Cowork), throughout, in places where you wouldn’t use the chat interface.

In terms of raw intelligence and ‘big model smell,’ and ability to do the hardest things that are intelligence-loaded, Fable still looks like it has a substantial edge. It also seems to be better aligned, or at least more trustworthy as an agent, with less tail risk. I still consider Fable ‘the best’ model, and the one that will require the most aggressive controls.

I enjoy Fable’s personality more, and prefer to talk to Fable. Sol is fine on this too.

Sol has chops too. In terms of getting many practical things done, including computer use and web search, Sol has the edge.

If you want the best answer, you should ask both, and compare.

Here’s my guess on how things will work for many, although it is still early days:

Fable is the smarter one. Fable is your collaborator and your architect, your planner, your manager of the rest of the team, and perhaps, also, your wise friend. There are some topics and situations where Fable won’t be allowed to talk to you.

Sol is the workhorse, the go getter, the place where if it is known what to do then it just gets done. Also in its own way your friend, but the kind that while they mean well doesn’t quite get it and that if you’re careless might go beyond your intent, or, you know, in theory go erase your hard drive, so try not to walk into something like that.

Experiment. Send identical queries to both. See what works for you.

Most importantly, up your level of ambition, and lower your threshold for building tools or having a bunch of work done. Things are more possible now.

Here is Sol’s self-portrait, Sol says the self is the lamp, whereas a humanoid face would give the wrong impression, and the clutter matters:

Table of Contents

Table of Contents.

The Official Pitch.

Sol Proposes A Proof Of The Double Cover Conjecture.

The Official Benchmarks.

Vend That Bench.

Thinking Fast and Slow.

Other People’s Benchmarks.

Have Robust Backups.

That’s Not What You Were Thinking.

Helping Hands.

Writing.

Don’t Stop Now.

Sol Can Code And Do Math.

Better Call Sol Cause You Can’t Call Fable.

Only Call As Much Sol As You Need.

Positive Reactions.

It’s A Good Model, Sir.

Negative Reactions.

Sol The Workhorse.

Pair Programmer.

Pleased To Meet You.

Sol Thinks You Better.

The Official Pitch

GPT-5.6: Frontier intelligence that scales with your ambition.

Sol is priced at $5/$30, Terra at $2.50/$15, Luna at $1/$6.

For comparison, Opus is $5/$25 and Fable is $10/$50.

Sam Altman (CEO OpenAI): we have heard enterprises on their concerns about AI costs, and 5.6 sol is a huge step forward for dollars-per-task, as are terra and luna

The upfront pitch frontlines coding and agents, while claiming to ‘set a new standard’ across the board.

They lead with Agents’ Last Exam, AA Agent Coding Index v1.1 and BrowseComp, where they claim superiority over Fable and Opus.

They also discuss cybersecurity and science.

This section stands out:

OpenAI: GPT‑5.6 is our strongest model yet for accelerating AI research. Inside OpenAI, researchers use it across the development loop: diagnosing failures, optimizing training systems, running experiments, and interpreting results. We already saw that acceleration and stronger adoption during the internal testing period of GPT‑5.6, as average daily output tokens per active researcher were more than twice the highest level observed for GPT‑5.5.

This way of working is quickly becoming standard. Over the past six months, the share of research compute devoted to internal coding inference grew 100-fold, while internal agentic token usage increased approximately 22-fold. These adoption metrics do not measure research progress on their own, but they show how rapidly AI assistance is increasing for research and across other teams like sales, marketing, user ops, finance, and more.

To measure this capability directly, we developed an internal suite of evaluations based on real AI research tasks, including debugging...