I’ve been subscribed to Claude for quite a while, but I’ve deliberately not committed to a yearly plan just in case some other company did something worth exploring. Well a company did just that, and at the end of my Claude subscription cycle too! OpenAI launched Astra - the first GPT 6 model, somewhat reminiscent of Fable being the first Claude 5 series model.

They’re said to be bringing it to subscriptions “over the next few days”, and they’ve historically been somewhat generous in allowing Plus accounts to use new models (Sol is often compared to Opus and Fable, of which only Opus is included for Claude Pro subs!), so I do think they’ll follow up on the promise.

They also include image generation. Again I am very unsure if that’s a good idea - image generation APIs are expensive, which alludes that it might be expensive for the provider too. But while it lasts it can make the plan a better deal, and GPT images are generally considered pretty good - might experiment with what it can do, as an image generation model with thinking seems like a fun thing to play with.

Anyways, this means I’ll likely be pausing my Claude sub for a moment (again, I don’t need that many tokens for now!) to try out a ChatGPT Plus plan next month, so you might see a few agent sections made by GPT models now! (Though we did already have a few made by Luna and Terra models). By the way, a Gemini sub isn’t too likely due to their training policies - it’s really hard to turn off training even for paid accounts.

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Pre-publishing update; Astra is available on my Plus account for Codex use as soon as I subscribed! Nice. Though it seems like I’ll default to Terra, the same way Claude Code can default to Sonnet for most tasks. (Or even Luna, it’s a much newer model than Haiku 4.5 so should be useful for saving quota!)