GPT-5.6 Sol vs Grok 4.7

GPT-5.6 Sol is the flagship model in OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family, which also includes Terra (a balanced everyday-work tier) and Luna (a fast, cost-efficient tier). Sol is designed for demanding reasoning, long-horizon agentic workflows, software engineering, computer use, scientific research, and cybersecurity tasks. It introduces two new capability modes: a "max" reasoning effort setting that allocates additional compute time for difficult problems, and an "ultra" mode that coordinates multiple subagents in parallel to accelerate complex, multi-step work. The model supports native multimodal input, allowing it to process screenshots, diagrams, charts, documents, and photographs alongside text. A reported context window of approximately 1.5 million tokens enables processing of large codebases, lengthy research documents, and extended agentic sessions.

GPT-5.6 Sol was announced on June 26, 2026, initially in a limited preview for trusted partners, and reached general availability on July 9, 2026. On the Agents' Last Exam benchmark, which evaluates long-running professional workflows across 55 fields, Sol scores 53.6. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, which tests command-line agentic coding workflows, Sol Ultra achieves 91.9%. The model also demonstrates gains in life sciences evaluations, including long-horizon genomics and quantitative biology analyses. OpenAI paired the release with its most extensive safety evaluation to date, combining human red teaming with large-scale automated testing, and classified Sol as High capability in both cybersecurity and biological risk under its Preparedness Framework, though it does not cross the Critical threshold in either category.

Grok 4.7 is a proprietary multimodal reasoning model from SpaceXAI that accepts images alongside text and returns text-only output. On visual inputs it supports image captioning, visual question answering, OCR, document and chart question answering, and image classification and tagging, with all results expressed as generated text rather than bounding boxes or masks. Its 500,000 token context window leaves room for several images, long documents, or extended conversations about visual content in a single request.

The model exposes a configurable reasoning effort setting with low, medium, high, and xhigh levels (high by default), letting callers trade latency for the amount of deliberation spent on a prompt, including multi-step questions about an image. Built on a larger base model than Grok 4.6 with extended reinforcement learning on harder tasks, it works longer on difficult problems and checks its own work more carefully at the same serving speed. SpaceXAI's launch materials focus on coding and agentic knowledge work and report no image benchmark results.