$224,700 combined token spend
Theo spent $131,700 and Ben spent $93,000 in API tokens testing GPT-5.6 Sol during the early access period.
Where this was said
Setting the Scene: OpenAI's Competitive Position
At 3:42 · chapter starts 2:45
After a brief, self-deprecating introduction, Theo takes the lead in framing why this particular model drop matters beyond the usual benchmarks. OpenAI is releasing into a world where Anthropic's Fable (Claude's frontier model, internally called Mythos-class) represents a genuine generational leap — a much larger model backed by a company that was previously compute-constrained and no longer is. Theo argues this is OpenAI's first time releasing into a position where they feel legitimately behind, not just slightly off. The model was almost certainly built on the same Phi-5 base with a new RL pass rather than a fresh pre-training run, and had to compete with Fable's size advantage while facing a political climate increasingly hostile to frontier model releases. The stakes feel different from previous cycles, making 5.6 one of the most consequential OpenAI drops in recent memory.
We Spent $224,700 Testing GPT-5.6 Sol
Theo burned $131,700 in API tokens and Ben burned $93,000 during their GPT-5.6 Sol early access period — a combined $224,700 before the model was even publicly available. Most of that was deliberate stress-testing with long-running loops and massive subagent swarms, not practical production work.
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