The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting
Simon Willison's pelican SVG comparison shows GPT-6 Astra producing markedly better images than GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna across reasoning levels.
Willison generated pelicans-riding-bicycles SVGs with newly accessed GPT-6 Astra at low through max reasoning levels and rendered them in a comparison grid against GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. Astra's outputs were markedly more coherent, while even the best GPT-5.6-Sol images remained largely abstract shapes. Astra does not support a reasoning=none setting, so all comparisons involved reasoning-enabled runs.
- Astra was tested at low, medium, high, xhigh, and max reasoning levels only.
- Best GPT-5.6-Sol output remained abstract shapes; every Astra pelican was clearer.
- Vendors
- OpenAI
- Organizations
- OpenAI
- AI models
- GPT-6 AstraGPT-5.6
From the original article
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.
simonwillison.net
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