❯ OpenAI opens Ultrafast mode for GPT-6.1 Sol, up to 8x faster at six times the standard API price

Same model, different tierOpenAI’s developer account announced on October 8 that Ultrafast mode for GPT-6.1 Sol was rolling out that day in the API, Codex and ChatGPT Work, at speeds up to 8x Sol Standard and with near-Astra intelligence. Ultrafast is not a new model. It is a service tier that makes the same model return output faster.

Speed costs five times moreAPI pricing is $12 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens. According to RuntimeWire, Sol’s standard rates are $2 and $10, so Ultrafast is exactly six times as much. OpenAI named three uses: debugging an outage, agents navigating apps, and live experiences where every second counts.

Subscribers need Pro 500The API tier is open to all developers. In Codex and ChatGPT Work it is limited to Pro 500, eligible usage-based Enterprise and credit-based Edu plans, and Enterprise administrators must turn it on. The same day, Codex lead Thibault Sottiaux said steering is now instant: when a user changes direction mid-task, the model adjusts right away instead of wasting effort.

Which requests deserve the fast laneDevelopment teams now have to sort their requests into tiers. Agents make successive calls to models and tools, and every wait compounds, so that is where speed pays most; background jobs nobody is watching do not need the fivefold premium. The price gap is large enough to make teams decide seriously which work has a person waiting at the screen.

▮ SIGNALAs model capabilities converge, speed has become a product with its own price tag, and OpenAI is betting developers will pay more to wait a few seconds less than to get a slightly smarter answer.