It is having improvements in other fields than coding while being more cost efficient.

If all I want is coding at a cheaper price, then deepseek is a good model for that.

I am more than okay to have a bifurcation of models good for coding and models good for everything other than coding. I strangely imagined it many years ago.

Everyone is suggesting OpenAI to release a model close to opus 5.5 yet it's releasing this. On one hand we can imagine that maybe their training cycle wasn't able to produce this whereas gpt 6.1 terra was made.

But on the other hand, I also now wish to see an OpenAI model which is good for just pure coding, like an absolute beast at it while being cheap (so the opposite of terra)

ironically, one of the few appreciations that I might give to OpenAI if they pushed this model to prod and are facing some pushback as developers like us want/only see coding models. They could've benchmaxed it and it would've been slightly irrelevant. I'd much rather see reality.

At the very least, this new model won't make things more expensive for anybody and would only make use-cases cheaper depending on what they are, so it's a fine deal for me.

I also wonder maybe this is why open source labs aren't targeting this space and why the only focus of AI labs is coding nowadays. Everything else just doesn't seem so worth it from investor, even end user, training perspective.

Maybe this is the reason why we have gotten almost an exponential growth in coding capabilities as that became the most (if not only) capability that truly really matters.

To not wish for discussion to go to a tangent, nonetheless this could also explain why our work as a software engineer is going through a slight crisis of meaning as these AI models have gotten impressive at coding.

As an (aspiring) developer (currently in 1st year college), I don't wish for AI to replace coding even more for me or to push it even more or to suck the joy out of it even further. So I am more than happy for these models to stay as they are and rather make advancements elseplace. Ironic because it is us developers who use AI as well and we want cheaper workflows and so we would also want models to be cheaper and better at coding. There are some fine lines of contradictions and irony in all of it. I'd much rather also have open-weight models of such terra-like models but I imagine that because of the reasons that I mentioned above, we are most likely gonna see it the most focused on coding but still open-weights is pretty close.

The more choices the better (though choice-fatigue is a real thing), I hope I was able to explain some of the nuance I feel about this particular launch.

Looking at newer models, Terra 6.1 is only a hair behind Sol 6.1, hopefully making it a useful Sol replacement for slightly easier tasks.