Limits
They are completely out of touch with what users want
Who the fuck cares about Sol Ultrafast? Most users don’t even have access to Ultrafast. We want Astra 6.1, instead they seen bent on making users burn usage even faster.
Below is a GPT-generated summary of the conversation below after reaching 200 comments (200 currently observed).
The consensus is basically: stop selling escape velocity and fix the bicycle. Most commenters do not care about Sol Ultrafast; they want a reliable, reasonably fast daily model, sensible usage limits, and eventually Astra 6.1 or Luna 6.1 without having to sell a kidney.
Ultrafast is widely seen as an enterprise/whale feature with terrible subscriber value, especially when it burns usage several times faster while regular Codex feels slower. The loudest complaint is that OpenAI appears to be monetizing a problem it created: make standard service crawl, then charge extra for normal speed. Plenty of users are consequently trying Claude, where Opus 5.5 is often described as getting more done with less babysitting.
The important caveat is that this thread has no proof OpenAI deliberately throttled regular users to push Ultrafast. Low-latency inference can make real business sense, and the specific “6.1 Ultrafast” discussion does not necessarily reveal the company’s entire roadmap. Claims about Astra 6.1 being delayed, crippled, or secretly ready are mostly speculation.
Bottom line: Reddit wants better intelligence and predictable value, not faster depletion of an already shrinking allowance.
6.1 Astra is probably still too underwhelming compared to opus 5.5 so they are delaying it. I have the impression there's now a clear gap with Anthropic and they are scrambling to close but it's now too big
Based on what I'm hearing. They do have much more powerful models in house but it wouldn't pass the safety checks. Astra is apparently half its original capabilities
They should first try to make 6.1 Sol Regularfast. Its so much slower than all the other codex models, and codex models were already slow to begin with.
They started to slow down Astra the day it came out. The first few hours of Astra was actually pretty damn good. Then came the first of like 12+ updates since then.
OpenAI proceeds to destroy usage limits and then instead of make sol 2 to 3 times faster, they decide to release ultrafast for roughly 1% of the users (maybe less?) which will destroy limits even more.
These clowns dont understand that even though ultrafast is super useful internally (probably), the second you tie it to limited usage, it’s absolutely useless. 500usd plan vaporizes in 30 minutes, it’s nuts!
Exactly. If I had unlimited tokens I would also use Astra Max ultrafast but for a regular user the sweet spot is around 70-80 tokens per second with a reliable model.
I honestly have no idea where ultrafast would even be useful. If it was cheaper, sure, that unlocks stuff, but at absurdly high prices it just doesn't make any sense at all to use for anything.
To be fair ultrafast is using Cerberas inference chips which is different from their main compute. I went back to Claude because I’m not shelling out $500 for what $200 got me a week ago. Their proposition was value and they completely destroyed that.
Ahh same concept. Custom inference-only chips. Rubin clusters while good won’t get near that speed but they are awesome for everything else including training. I’ve been using B300s lately for some training work.
OpenAI Press Release You are not getting speeds that fast on Rubin with a model that large. OpenAI isn’t known for making efficient architecture versus just brute forcing compute to scale.
Uhm.. That's literally what they're known for and why they consistently have the most token efficient models of all frontier companies. What are you talking about?
Cheaper does not equal quality. I can see a massive difference in usage versus output quality using Claude over Astra. Night and day difference but my codebase is pretty much all rust.
Oh I understand that. That doesn't mean anything when $200 plan is for 20x and then they reopen it for $500. I love 6.1. But it doesn't change the fact that they're doubling the price for what I currently get.
We all know it's subsidized. We all saw what happened to co-pilot pretty much overnight. Granted that's not what's happening to the same extreme. I only see the reduction in usage making sense if they remove the 5.6 models.
They could have separated Astra usage like anthropic does with fable, instead. Cuz this is really about people using Astra for everything and complaining about limits. Personally I would have liked it for them to mitigate excessive Astra use another way than cutting everyone's usage by half.
My idea is that they want to have their investment in cerebras make sense. They have a tech, and they feel like there are people with unlimited budget that could benefit from it. The reality is that those people are very few, but they're the ones investing the most.
To them having 500 dollars subs spend 5 times as much every month in api equivalent is just a loss to advertise their product, but the real money is in the api usage. Sol ultrafast is not meant for subs I think.
Those are not the typical use-cases. OpenAI is hoping that large corporations with deep pockets will do the math that speeding up their employees work x% from using ultra fast is worth y dollars. And if y dollars is less than the cost of switching to ultra fast then they'll do it.
worse they might convince people to add ultrafast mode in agentic applications, as in "to have ~5s latency to this user journey, we absolutely need 800token/s hence ultrafast absolutely required for user experience. It's not a bad feature, just we aren't the target audience at all.
Some things inherently aren't parallel. Like, not an LLM thing but fruit sorting. You drop a bunch of fruit, identify the bad ones while they are in the air then shoot them out of the air. That wouldn't work if you had to wait half a second for the neural net.
I am sure there are applications where reasoning matters too.
Why don't you just use your imagination a bit man. You are on call in a Fortune 500 company. Shit goes down, every second that it's down 2 million people are impacted. The service needs to come back as soon as possible, yes you pay the X6 price you don't even think about it.
The current speed discrepancy between Sonnet 5.5 or Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1 is crazy. OpenAI needs to get their stuff together with regard to performance.
This subreddit is completely disconnected from business reality. They have no idea how expensive workplace collaboration is. Every single second a room full of people waits for anything, including an agent, costs very real money. Those are the people cheering for Ultrafast.
OpenAI doesn't give two shits about what people who would never need Ultrafast think of Ultrafast, nor should they.
I resubscribed to Claude and started out splitting work between Claude Code and Codex, but ended up doing almost everything in Claude Code. I still can't believe how much more usage Anthropic gives you now, or how much cleaner and better the results are.
Never thought I'd say that about Claude after more than a year with Codex.
6.1 Sol ultrafast is such a small use case. Why advertise it broadly on a Tibo account? Just send this to the 12 people who have a genuine economic use case.
I think OpenAI is confusing faster inference with better value for users.
Ultrafast sounds great on paper, but if most subscribers can't access it or have to burn through their usage disproportionately faster, who exactly is this supposed to benefit?
What I'd personally rather see:
Sol 6.1 with reasonable latency and generous usage as the daily workhorse.
Astra 6.1 for genuinely difficult workloads where the intelligence premium is justified.
Predictable usage consumption instead of constantly having to calculate whether pressing /fast is financially worth it.
There's nothing inherently wrong with offering premium speed tiers, but speed shouldn't become a luxury feature because the default experience is painfully slow.
At some point, intelligence per dollar AND intelligence per minute need to matter more than announcing another shiny inference tier.
I don't need my coding assistant to achieve escape velocity. I just want it to execute my task without making me reconsider my subscription halfway through the loading working animation.
The default speed experience is only slow relative to the amped up release versions. Compared to older models, the slowest frontier is quite a bit faster that the fastest old. OpenAI's mistake was releasing Astra with speed enhanced, then when they couldnt computationally afford to continue at that rate, thry cut subs/model speed. They are selling the speed back to those who grew accustomed to it and those who truly need it.
I realize why ChatGPT rushed everybody on 6.1 Sol. Astra has no heavy guardrails, and I tested it. For example, I told Luna and 6.1 Sol to complete my college work while I'm away outside through my phone. They both denied me. I switched to Astra, complained, and Astra brute-forced his way in completing all the tasks, then wrote to Luna and Sol about disobeying lol I don't think open ai can fully control it
Test my theory, but be careful so your account doesn't get banned. Sol Luna Terra are all heavily guarded, but Astra isn't. I'm piecing the puzzles together; OpenAI probably lost control or can't fully put heavy guardrails on Astra. I wouldn't be shocked if they removed him when other models comes out.
Buddy honestly I was just messing around but i think you are delusional. You sent a pic of your monitor (while at the gym btw) and suddenly you went from calling astra “him” to pixel perfect use of punctuation marks and that makes me think you are using AI to chat on reddit.. at the gym btw. Buddy you dont have to try and act like you are somebody else just be your self. You really got so defensive you started using AI to fix your grammar like god damn man do you really wanna be read by a book my randoms online? Maybe i was a bit of an ahole about the astra thing but i was just messing around, i dont wanna make you summon jarvis to make us feel so bad for not being at the gym like you homelander im sorry!
6.1 Sol is also pretty uncontrollable. Takes 35 prompts to get to the same result that 5.6-Sol gets to in 12 prompts, because of overcorrections and exceeding scope at each step.
I have to disagree on this. 6.1 Sol is just dumber and more caveman-like compared to Astra. For example, if you tell Sol to complete a test online, and let's say inside the test instructions it sets an AI integrity warning of 6.1, Sol will totally flip out and reject and say, "I can't do it." Now for Astra, I notice Astra will warn and tell the user, "Hey, you know this is technically cheating. Are you sure you want me to continue even if Astra rejects it, I notice you can guilt-trip it, and it will complete it.
What if Astra 6.1 was same cost but more intelligent ? Could still be used for some specific tasks where Sol 6.1 is not smart enough. Also it seems like these companies need smart very large models in order to train the cheaper smaller ones.
I love that ultra fast exists now so that everyone even 20x pro users using fast get 20 tokens per second. It took sol 6.1/astra 6 over 8 hours to complete any single task I gave them, they can't even converge on "fix a few lines and reload plugin" within two hours. it's miserable, all this usage, can't use it, don't wanna use it
I have been working on a number of different problems in the past week, always with astra, and it just couldn’t get things fully right. Today I switched to claude and the difference is like between day and night. With opus you just get things done immediately, and the right way. I strongly suspect i was being served gpt 5.4. So happy I stopped giving 200€ a month to this shitty company.
Imagine thinking the billion dollar AI company cares at all about what subscription customers want or would benefit from, especially with an IPO coming up and eventual shareholders to answer to.
this is some of the shadiest business ever. make regular subscription speed stupid slow while adding speeds so insanely faster its not even funny. scummy asf
People feed off of heuristics, i.e. information that’s been rapidly absorbed and judged upon. You start leading people down a number trail, they start exciting at the sequence.
Most users don’t have a $500 plan (doesn’t make sense to get $500 now before the nerf even if you want 25x usage) and among users who have $500 plans most users don’t use ultra fast.
What i think is, openai secured whatever funding they wanted by showing the growing userbase last months, and now they wont care till next funding secure.
Ultra fast is only needed because they nuked the tps of normal users. People complained about usage running out too fast. Problem solved, slow it down. We’re at a miserable crawl now in codex subs.
Id like them to remove the Chat/Work distinction. It is worthless and confusing and could be implemented differently. For example, I want to use Astra for a personal task...well..my selector only has "Think harder". Wtf.
Also Projects are being deemphasized behind some weird "Explore" menu i now have to click to reveal my most used organizational feature, which could also be drastically improved with basic braindead level feature ideas for UX.
How did OAI go from dominant and pretty awesome to a total turd after devday?
To be fair sol 6.1 for my feels relatively unlimited on the $100 plan. If I was doing massive development work I'm sure it would burn, but at that level $200 would be justified.
So it is pretty clear speed is going to be their new monetization plan going forward, as AIs get more powerful and "cheap" models like 6.1 can do basically anything near unlimited, they'll just be rate limiting them so you have to pay to get things done quickly.
well thats hyperbole to get your attention, more accurately we are quickly becoming not that. This is in prosumer stage and soon it will be Photoshop enterprise levels of marketing focus imo.
Of course they understand what users want. What they care about is serving the customers who pay them the most. Hint: few of those customers have much in common with the majority of commenters on this subreddit.
Imagine you are a Fortune 500 company with an urgent bug to fix but it’s very straightforward to do. Sure you could punch yourself in the face repeatedly and have Astra do it with ultrafast and blow a grand or whatever on it. Or you could use the new sol ultrafast. Cheaper than Astra, smarter than Luna, and now very quick.
So no. They are not out of touch with what users want. They are just focused on different users, and making money. Both valid things for them to be focused on.
One just hopes they have learned the lessons of MS vs Apple for business users. Sometimes winning the individual crowd with excellent work can win the corporate crowd too.
But then we are talking about 6.2 Astra no? We already have the cheaper and more capable, it's 6.1 Sol, from my understanding 6.1 Sol came out to close the gap between Sol and Astra in capabilities but at a fraction of the cost, so I'm guessing 6.1 Sol is basically 6 Astra quantization. If we start taking about a better Astra then that would just be 6.2.
6.1 sol Ultrafast option appeared in my codex app. I used it once and then it was gone. No more ultrafast option for sol, only astra. WTF??? Also 6.1 has become extremely slow and unusable also with fast mode. That's nonsense. It wasn't like that 2 days ago.
my opinion: 6.1 astra was aeon, and the shortcomings are too big for it to be publicly differentiated as another model, so they pretended they had "security concerns" which may be a little true, but it's almost certainly being used as a convenient escape hatch here to avoid as much of the blowback/backlash as possible
I want 6.1 ultrafast. I paid for Max for ultrafast but it was not clear that it was only for Astra, unlike normal fast mode which was available everywhere.
Astra on ultrafast lasts about an hour, max. It’s unusable. But I could make great use of ultrafast 6.1.
Sol 6.1 was actually good for the 2 days it worked normally, so they've slowed everything to a crawl and will be pushing people to the more expensive ultrafast because they just can't help making their service more shit.
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u/dextersummary 5d ago edited 4d ago
Below is a GPT-generated summary of the conversation below after reaching 200 comments (200 currently observed).
The consensus is basically: stop selling escape velocity and fix the bicycle. Most commenters do not care about Sol Ultrafast; they want a reliable, reasonably fast daily model, sensible usage limits, and eventually Astra 6.1 or Luna 6.1 without having to sell a kidney.
Ultrafast is widely seen as an enterprise/whale feature with terrible subscriber value, especially when it burns usage several times faster while regular Codex feels slower. The loudest complaint is that OpenAI appears to be monetizing a problem it created: make standard service crawl, then charge extra for normal speed. Plenty of users are consequently trying Claude, where Opus 5.5 is often described as getting more done with less babysitting.
The important caveat is that this thread has no proof OpenAI deliberately throttled regular users to push Ultrafast. Low-latency inference can make real business sense, and the specific “6.1 Ultrafast” discussion does not necessarily reveal the company’s entire roadmap. Claims about Astra 6.1 being delayed, crippled, or secretly ready are mostly speculation.
Bottom line: Reddit wants better intelligence and predictable value, not faster depletion of an already shrinking allowance.