❯ GPT-6.1 Sol becomes OpenAI’s most demanded model as the CFO confirms 70%-plus Q3 run-rate growth

Swamped on day oneThibault Sottiaux (Tibo), who leads OpenAI’s Codex, said on X that GPT-6.1 Sol, released Tuesday, is pretty much OpenAI’s most demanded model ever, across both the API and subscriptions. ChatGPT and Codex were under heavy load at times; the team has brought more compute online and speeds are recovering.

Cheap means more useGPT-6.1 Sol offers near-Astra capability at one-fifth of Astra’s price, at $2 per million input tokens. Artificial Analysis estimates its cost per task is about 30% lower than GPT-6 Sol, released just a week earlier. Lower prices directly drove usage, shifting many coding and automation tasks that users were reluctant to run on the flagship model onto Sol.

Revenue figures confirmedOpenAI CFO Sarah Friar confirmed on CNBC that the company’s annualized revenue run rate grew more than 70% in the third quarter and business revenue has doubled since July, in line with earlier Axios reporting. Surging demand also brings strain: when compute runs short, users feel it as slowdowns, which is why OpenAI is raising money and building data centers at the same time.

▪ SIGNALCutting prices hasn’t made OpenAI earn less; it has pushed more work onto its servers, making compute supply the real constraint.