GPT-5.6 Sol vs Muse Spark 1.1

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.

Muse Spark 1.1 is a natively multimodal reasoning model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, released on July 9, 2026, as a significant upgrade to the original Muse Spark. The model accepts text, image, video, PDF, and audio as input and produces text output. It operates with a 1-million-token context window (1,048,576 tokens per the Meta Model API documentation) and is designed specifically for agentic tasks that require planning, tool use, computer use, and multi-agent orchestration. The model runs in a "Thinking" mode, where adjustable reasoning effort is applied before generating a response. It can function both as a main agent gathering context, forming plans, and delegating to parallel subagents and as a subagent that adheres to assigned tasks and escalates when needed. It is trained to decide autonomously when to write automation scripts versus interact directly with a user interface.

Muse Spark 1.1 supports a range of multimodal capabilities including visual perception, image and video captioning, visual-to-code generation, and document analysis. The model was evaluated under Meta's Advanced AI Scaling Framework across frontier risk categories including chemical and biological threats, cybersecurity, and loss-of-control scenarios. Parameter count, architecture details, and training data composition are not publicly disclosed. The model is proprietary and closed-weight, accessible to consumers through the Meta AI app and to developers via the Meta Model API, which launched in public preview alongside this release.