On specific coding skewed benchmarks yes.

But Astra is in a different league when it comes to doing research and investigative tasks that require exploration.

For my usecases, Astra is pareto frontier - it dominates Fable 5.1 on cost. Fable 5.1 is a phenomenal model but Astra is cheaper and uses way less tokens and steps to produce similar output.

No, Astra is still smarter (https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/?models=gpt-6-astra%2Cg...).

My assumption is Astra is the biggest model in terms of param size and has the most intellectual horsepower.

But Sol-6.1 is more instruction tuned to perform better on the average use cases for most users, so it benchmarks better and feels better to use.