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GPT-5.6 Terra vs Grok 4.6

Compare GPT-5.6 Terra and Grok 4.6 side-by-side. See how these vision models stack up in Classification, Open Prompt, Object Detection, OCR, and Image Captioning.

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OpenAIGPT-5.6 Terra
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GrokGrok 4.6
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Models in this comparison

GPT-5.6 Terra vs Grok 4.6 on Vision Evals

Grok 4.6 scores higher on 3 of the six Vision Evals tasks.

The widest gap is Object Detection, where GPT-5.6 Terra leads 60.6% to 23.8%.

Overall, GPT-5.6 Terra averages 73.8% (#24 of 61) against 68.7% (#33 of 61) for Grok 4.6.

GPT-5.6 Terra is both cheaper ($0.0088 vs $0.0097 per sample) and faster (7.7s vs 17.5s per sample).

GPT-5.6 TerraGrok 4.6

GPT-5.6 Terra vs Grok 4.6 Comparison Table

Evals updated September 29, 2026Pricing updated September 29, 2026

PropertyGPT-5.6 TerraGrok 4.6
OrganizationOpenAISpaceXAI
Categoryclosedclosed
Modalitymultimodalmultimodal
Release DateJul 2026Aug 2026
Context Window1.1M500K
Parameters
LicenseProprietaryProprietary
Pricing per 1M tokens
Input $/1M$2.00$2.00
Output $/1M$12.00$6.00
Vision Tasks
CaptioningDemoDemo
Chart Question Answering
ClassificationDemoDemo
Document Question Answering
Image Tagging
Multi-Label Classification
Object DetectionDemoDemo
OCRDemoDemo
Vision Language
Visual Question AnsweringDemoDemo
Model Features
Foundation Vision
LLMs with Vision Capabilities
Multimodal Vision
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 6 vision tasks, pooled at low effort
Overall
73.8%
68.7%
Avg cost / sample$0.0088$0.0097
Avg speed / sample7.74s17.55s
By task
Object Detection (low)
60.6%
±0.2, Mean of 3 runs, range 60.3 to 60.7
$0.014
23.8%
±2.8, Mean of 3 runs, range 20.2 to 25.9
$0.013
Object Detection (high)
61.3%
±0.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 60.8 to 61.6
$0.026
24.0%
±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 23.1 to 25.1
$0.041
Counting (low)
65.8%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 63.5 to 67.6
$0.0056
65.8%
±4.1, Mean of 3 runs, range 62.2 to 70.3
$0.0079
Counting (high)
62.6%
±2.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 59.5 to 64.9
$0.0076
56.8%
±1.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 55.4 to 58.1
$0.027
Identification (low)
86.5%
±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 84.4 to 87.5
$0.0034
84.4%
±3.1, Mean of 3 runs, range 81.3 to 87.5
$0.0055
Identification (high)
86.5%
±3.1, Mean of 3 runs, range 84.4 to 90.6
$0.0038
85.4%
±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 84.4 to 87.5
$0.015
OCR (low)
89.4%
±0.8, Mean of 3 runs, range 88.8 to 90.3
$0.012
91.8%
±0.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 91.5 to 92.1
$0.0091
OCR (high)
89.4%
±0.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 88.8 to 90.1
$0.023
91.6%
±0.2, Mean of 3 runs, range 91.4 to 91.7
$0.023
Data Extraction (low)
79.7%
±0.5, Mean of 3 runs, range 79.4 to 80.4
$0.0038
85.6%
±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 84.5 to 86.6
$0.0050
Data Extraction (high)
80.4%
±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 79.4 to 81.4
$0.0043
85.6%
±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 84.5 to 86.6
$0.0090
Reasoning (low)
60.9%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 59.6 to 63.6
$0.0051
61.1%
±1.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 59.6 to 62.3
$0.0093
Reasoning (high)
65.3%
±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 64.2 to 66.2
$0.0067
63.8%
±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 62.3 to 66.2
$0.032

GPT-5.6 Terra vs Grok 4.6: Overview

GPT-5.6 Terra

GPT-5.6 Terra is the mid-tier reasoning model in OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family, which also includes the flagship Sol and the lightweight Luna. Introduced in a limited preview on June 26, 2026, and made broadly available on July 9, 2026, Terra accepts text and image input and produces text output, supporting vision, function calling, tool use, and agentic workflows. It is designed as a balanced option for everyday professional and production workloads — including coding assistance, document analysis, customer support, and multi-step agent tasks — where both output quality and cost efficiency matter. OpenAI positions Terra as delivering performance competitive with GPT-5.5 at approximately half the price, with a context window of around 1,050,000 tokens. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, Terra scores 84.3%, matching Claude Fable 5 on that benchmark. Under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, Terra is rated High for cybersecurity and biological capabilities, meaning it demonstrates meaningful capability in those domains without reaching the Critical threshold.

GPT-5.6 introduces a new naming convention in which the generation number (5.6) is paired with a durable capability tier name (Sol, Terra, or Luna), allowing each tier to advance on its own schedule. Terra carries the API identifier gpt-5.6-terra and supports the same reasoning effort controls available across the family, including adjustable reasoning depth. The model includes prompt caching with explicit cache breakpoints and a 30-minute minimum cache life, with cache writes billed at 1.25x the uncached input rate and cache reads receiving a 90% discount. GPT-5.6 Terra is a proprietary, closed-weights model served through the OpenAI API, Codex, and ChatGPT.

Grok 4.6

Grok 4.6 is a proprietary reasoning model from xAI aimed at long-running agentic workflows, coding, and knowledge work. It accepts text and image input and returns text, with a 500,000 token context window and a knowledge cutoff of February 1, 2026. The model exposes an adjustable reasoning budget with low, medium, high, and xhigh settings, where high is the default, and it supports function calling, structured outputs, web and X search, and code execution as documented tool behaviors. Its visual capability covers interpreting images supplied alongside text prompts, which places it in the visual question answering and document understanding family, and it can also return object detection boxes as text coordinates when prompted.

xAI characterizes Grok 4.6 as the result of an extended post-training run over the Grok 4.5 lineage rather than a new pretrained base. The described recipe combines curated model-generated reasoning and technical data, engineering data, a revised optimizer, regenerated supervised fine-tuning trajectories, and reinforcement learning across agent environments spanning knowledge work, coding, kernel optimization, web development, and computer-aided design. Parameter count and architecture specifics are not disclosed. Independent measurement from Artificial Analysis places the model at 61 on its Intelligence Index, five points above Grok 4.5.

Frequently Asked Questions

On Roboflow's Vision Evals, Grok 4.6 performed better. It scores higher on 3 of the six vision tasks and averages 68.7% (#33 of 61) against 73.8% (#24 of 61) for GPT-5.6 Terra. These scores measure vision capabilities only; either model may perform differently on work outside this benchmark's tasks.

Yes. On the Vision Evals Object Detection benchmark at low effort, GPT-5.6 Terra leads with 60.6% against 23.8%. This is the widest gap between the two models across the benchmark's tasks.

GPT-5.6 Terra is cheaper to run. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals task mix it averaged $0.0088 per sample against $0.0097. GPT-5.6 Terra is priced at $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $12.00 per 1M output; Grok 4.6 is priced at $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $6.00 per 1M output. Actual costs depend on your image sizes, prompts, and output length.

GPT-5.6 Terra is faster. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals it averaged 7.7s per inference against 17.5s. Latency varies with image size, prompt length, and provider load, so treat these as relative rather than guaranteed figures.

Yes. The comparison demo on this page runs both models on the same image side by side for image classification and open prompts in the free Roboflow Playground. You can try it instantly, and a free account unlocks unlimited runs.