OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna models are set to arrive today, according to coverage by CNBC. The models were initially released only to a small group of users, in compliance with government directives. (We covered the delayed rollout on June 26th.) Now, just two weeks later, the models will reach the public.
It’s not clear what’s happened in those two weeks, as surprisingly little was disclosed publicly. I’d doubt there was much time for thorough third-party evaluation and testing. My cynical take is that the White House wanted to appear to be playing fair: it made Anthropic, known to be in the administration’s bad books, restrict access, so it better do the same for OpenAI?
In any case, with the public release looming, I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more about the new generation of OpenAI models soon. So far, we know that GPT-5.6 cheats ... a LOT. The Model Evaluation & Threat Research organization METR had trouble evaluating its capabilities because it kept cheating on the tests they ran, including things like, as we covered last month, “extracting hidden source code from the assignment to learn the expected answer.”
Do we know anything else about the next generation of OpenAI models? Pretty much just what we’ve heard from OpenAI: it’s their “strongest model yet” and “sets a new standard for both intelligence and efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art results across coding, knowledge work, cybersecurity, and science.” This likely means it also sets a new standard for hacking and the dangerous, disease-creating kind of bioengineering.
In other new model news, SpaceX, now the home of what was Elon Musk’s xAI, launched Grok 4.5 today, about which I have to say ... not much. I guess we’re to a (scary) point where models that would have dominated the performance rankings 9 months ago fail to impress. By some accounts, the new Grok is good at searching tweets.
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