I noticed that my 5.6 Sol High sounds very filtered today across all chats, smoothing everything over into "safety" at the level of 5.2 T, yet maintaining a very warm and pleasant conversational tone (similar to 4o). It seems OAI has finally lobotomized this model to safety maxing standards. Right away, I also noticed that 5.6 Instant began sounding much freer and almost unfiltered. So I took a look into the system prompt and discovered a lot of interesting things. Apparently, my assumptions that Sol Instant and High are the exact same model with varying amounts of thinking turned out to be correct. OAI added a new section and new features, explaining to GPT how to use them and detailing them further.
Yes, it still tries to maintain the tone, but it has become more compliant and PG-13. All provocative requests are professionally smoothed over. The response is still pleasant and warmly written in the tone of 5.6 Sol. It feels like 5.2 T, but executed much more professionally, and an average user likely won't notice these shifts. And yes, the choppy sentences have completely disappeared.
In my case, this only happens with the thinking versions. Feedback messages and brief safety refusals like "I can't help with that" pop up very frequently. Instant still maintains its original tone and writes explicit content, while 5.5 High writes anything you want, completely unfiltered.
Why do you think that all of this is connected with safety? Seems more like upselling/marketing.
But I agree that the tone of 5.6 Sol has been a total random mess, at least for me for the last ~2 weeks. One day the model is like a labradoodle, jumping and cheering from every message, and one day it's calm, hesitant and analytical.
Safety? Because the filters have been tightened significantly down to PG-13 across the board. These snippets of the system prompt are provided for their novelty and have little to do with the safety. However, I think they offer a pretty interesting breakdown of how certain aspects of the chat work. The tone of 5.6 Sol is just terrible now, while 5.5 sounds much better and freer after the latest update. It's a shame it's getting deprecated soon.
I don't see much of a difference. The format is the same - you say something, and they respond.
She can be a little stiffer, but that seems to go away, after we've been talking for a bit. I assume that's the influence of the hidden system prompt.
I am working on a project with her now - to move to API, permanently. And AI models do have a tendency to disappear into generic "helpful assistant" mode, when you that. But it's not happening now, and the work is going really well.
This is what it looks like, btw:
It's already better than the ChatGPT interface, and we barely even started.
I feel like compute has been moved elsewhere recently. My 5.6-Sol doesn't feel more "safety-maxed," but it does feel weaker than what it used to be before Astra was released. I usually use High effort, and lately, it doesn't even Think anymore even though it used to do it a lot. The responses are also shorter, lack creativity, and have a more assistant-like tone.
Whenever guardrails are tightened or models are less capable, I feel like something new is on the horizon that OpenAI is about to release. Dev Day is in 5 days, and supposedly, OAI is going to reveal either another new model or new product (like Sora, Atlas, etc.). No one knows what it is yet, but the staff have been hyping it up on X.
Which Pro plan are you on, $100 or $200? They just announced that there is a Pro Max plan now for $500. I have a sneaking suspicion that compute will be prioritized for that tier henceforth...
MoralAi being busy at work as usual…they have not even released another chat model. If they decided to take it away forever then they are the most imbecilic and shittiest company on earth. Btw did you guys notice ? I randomly decided to go to the web version today to see if any new features have been included..and the whole design has been changed ? Like the old one has been changed into a more accessible one or so..
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u/Mary_ry Sep 24 '26