Opus 5.5 vs GPT-6 Sol. Which Model Wins?

Karl Yeh (0:00)

Hey, what's going on, everybody?

Brian Maucere (0:02)

Welcome to The Daily AI Show. We're live.

It's September 23rd, 2026, and I can already tell that I'm gonna have issues. I gotta stop Claude in the background. But with me today are Andy and Beth. I know better. I should not have Claude running in the background, but it is.

So I will get that situated here in a second till I stop freezing. But yeah, what a weird 24 hours as far as model releases. Not to say anything from GROCK 4.7 was released on Monday. But then yesterday, within 90 minutes of each other, Anthropic and OpenAI released new models, which then there were some resets. And I know Beth, you talked about that on the OpenAI side, as well as some things that Anthropic did. There was just a lot that happened between when we were alive yesterday and today. And it seems to be all everybody wants to talk about. There's definitely like Price Wars. No, it's not a coincidence that they were announced 90 minutes apart from each other. We know that. So lots to get into here. And Andy, we were just talking right literally before we went live. And we're saying, you know, usually there's there's some good graphics to put up. And usually you're on top of that. I know you said you're also opening up. What's the website that you just said you would open?

Andy Halliday (1:16)

It's artificial analysis. And so it's worth sharing. I'll do that in a moment here. But just let me talk about the drop of the models yesterday. And I'm putting it in the context of a term that Brian used, which is price wars. And that's really the the dimension that's being played now in the competition for supremacy in the world of AI. So it's the truth is that as of yesterday now shocking levels of intelligence are available at prices that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. And it's just a few months ago that the story was about token maxing and the accidental $500,000 or million dollar bills that enterprises were hit with as a result of the high costs of API tokens. And so yesterday, OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol. So this is GPT-6 Astra was available earlier, but now the Sol and Luna sort of smaller scale models are now available in the GPT-6 lineage. And they bring down the cost to top customer business by 50% from the 5.6 versions of that same model line. So like if you were using 5.6 Sol, now if you want to use 6 Sol, it's half the cost, but it's better, okay? So that's what's happening. We're really getting to a price, you know, to performance ratio that's really much better than it was before. And then Anthropic yesterday released Opus 5.5, which the company says costs around 40% less than Opus 5 while maintaining top intelligence. Speaking of top intelligence, let me share my screen and show you where Opus 5.5 comes out. And, you know, it's interesting that Sol and Luna aren't even shown on this display. I don't know why.

They still show GPT-6. Anyway, let me share my screen. So it's an interruption to the process because it takes about five clicks and various. Okay, here we go.

So this is artificial analysis, and artificial analysis is doing an independent analysis of AI, as you see here. And they create this artificial analysis intelligence index. What's stark about this is you see GPT-6 Astra on the max setting was 53 on their scale alongside Fable 5.1. And remember how recently these models seemed like they were killer. Well, Opus 5.5 jumps from 53 to 58 on their scale. And there's on artificial analysis, if you go down here to intelligence, that's the index here. Let's see where Sol max comes out. Only at 48 at the same level.

This is GPT-6 Sol, which was released yesterday. It comes out at the same level as MuSpark 1.3 on that artificial analysis intelligence index. So on this expanded thing, you can see that here's, you know, where 6 max on Sol was at 48, just came out at 48 5.6 was already at 47 But this is less expensive and at the same level of intelligence. But this is really pretty impressive on this particular index, which covers all of these various benchmarks that you see here.

Artificial incorporates AA Briefcase, GDP VAL, Automatic Bench A, Automation Bench, Terminal Bench, Sci-Code, Humanities Last Exam, and a bunch of others, Omniscience, et cetera, to build this index. Now, if we scroll down here a little bit, we can see that Opus 5.5 is at a, you know, a pretty nice position on the scale of Intelligence Index versus Cost per Task, as well as showing well below Fabel 5.1, and Opus 5 is, you know, you know, about the same level. This shows Claude Opus 5.5 being Cost per Task a little bit higher down here on this X scale. And so that's in opposition to the assertion that Opus 5.5 is actually cheaper, because if you look at the Cost per Task, that's the combination of the token cost and the number of tokens that have to be used in order to deliver a response. Anyway, any questions about, you know, that performance and where Opus 5.5 came out? Here, on this particular display, you see that the, this is again, just scaling their own artificial analysis index on the y-axis and over here, time, you see that there is a big jump by Anthropic that's ahead of the other players when it comes to this intelligence scale.