aha! with the benefit of hindsight, i just figured out openai’s marketing team seriously cooked hard with their gpt 5.6 release
let me reverse GTM what happened for you
at that time, fable was already released and people were loving it. but openai knew astra was far from being ready
if people ask “what’s your answer to fable” and they say “we are a few months behind”, it’ll damage their brand
so instead of doing the typical 2-tier “gpt 5.6” and “gpt 5.6 mini”, they artificially created a 3-tier system with a new naming scheme - sol, terra, luna
pretty sure terra was not even originally planned but added last minute to make this plan work. in their release announcement, terra was said to be the same performance as gpt 5.5, while sol is a step function better
this created a perception that sol was openai’s fable equivalent. if you still remember, most of the reviews back then were comparing sol with fable. many of which even said sol was better
that bought so much time for openai to catch up without being seen as falling behind
and now that astra is here, terra immediately got killed in the 6 series because it was never real!
everything made sense now, and it’s absolutely brilliant