astra 6.x has to drop this week otherwise they're clearly slowing down their release pace
not to forget anthropic has fable 5.5 and opus 5.6 ready and they went with fable 5.2 instead of 5.5 because openai hasn't seriously challenged opus 5.5's lead in a while
almost 2 months since oai's last big model
astra 6.2 will be another big leap in Computer Use compared to other models
the combination of visual and spatial understanding, screen grounding, tool use and the ability to navigate multi-step workflows will put it much further ahead. openai is its own biggest competitor in this area
astra is already an incredible model so astra 6.x only needs to improve the little things: taste and a better understanding of user intentions
compared to opus 5.5 both astra and sol feel extremely rigid. they're excellent at targeted tasks with clear goals but when it comes to more open-ended work they can be very frustrating to deal with
Astra 6.2 might release today and I have a theory I hope it's wrong that this model is gonna be Fat and I mean Fat AF that it will eat usage like there's no limits, hint OpenAI doubling usage limits.
astra has a bigger brain than opus and fable
but astra was heavily mistreated during pre- or post-training with too much focus on benchmarks and too little on alignment
to use a human analogy: you can be smarter but still make stupid mistakes