“Polaris Alpha,” the presumed GPT-5.1, is performing remarkably well in early tests - with high rate limits. GPT-5 was particularly important for OpenAI at release because it’s an extremely efficient model.
So it wouldn’t surprise me if GPT-5.1 is even more efficient; a win-win situation for OpenAI.Sam keeps repeating that compute constraints are the biggest issue—and will continue to be—so they’re buying compute wherever possible. A focus on greater efficiency is therefore only logical.
New models on EQ-Bench writing evals: Kimi-K2-Thinking and the stealthed openrouter model polaris-alpha.
Polaris-alpha likely is gpt-5.1, based on how the outputs cluster nearest gpt-5 and the fact that the model has very high rate limits.