Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

4th September 2026

I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles—at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn’t support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison grid with GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, and beyond being fun the result was surprisingly useful.

See the grid for full quality images. Here’s the transcript that created the GPT-6 Nova pelicans.

There are a few interesting things that stand out from this grid.

• The Astra pelicans are much better. The very best GPT-5.6-Sol pelican (I liked xhigh better than max) is still pretty clearly a bunch of abstract shapes. Every single one of the Astra pelicans, from low to xhigh, looks better than that. The Astra max one is really good.
• Astra below max still doesn’t reliably get the pelican legs on both sides of the frame.
• In terms of cost, Astra may be around twice the price of Sol ($10/million input, $50/million output, compared to $5/$30 for Sol), but it uses significantly less tokens at each of the levels, making the prices at the different levels closer than they might otherwise be.
• Astra low produces a better pelican than ANY of the GPT-5.6 Sol models at any level, for 9.55 cents. Spending 10 cents on any other model gets a much worse result.
• Look at the input token counts: Astra and Luna both used 16 input tokens, Sol and Terra used 26. That’s interesting.

I wonder if Astra and Luna are more related to each other than OpenAI let on?