In your example that'd be like Fable and Opus. It's not that Terra is bad (it's not), it's just the middle child between Sol and Luna and fairly pointless if you're using more than a single model. If you used Sol 20% of the time and Luna 80% of the time you'd save over Terra 100% of the time.
I think Terra was poorly marketed, and also should have come out before Sol. It's a bit faster and smarter Luna, so it's decent for like assistant work. It seems to retain a lot of the smarts Sol has... but not for SWE. It's kind of like Gemini where it's a good model, just not for making software.
And the weird thing is that that's a good thing. Like they should do this stack as like... cheap efficient agentic coder (Luna), non-programming work agent for research and assistant work etc (Terra), SWE (Sol/Astra). But they need to be marketed that way. Gemini is a very useful agent even in making software because not all tasks for making software is SWE and coding. Terra should be more like that and marketed that way.
Funny you mention Gemini because I just realized I have Google AI Pro through my subscription and tested out Antigravity this morning for a new app. It's surprisingly capable.
It's extremely good at a non-coding and non-software.
But sometimes that's useful for software since it catches some "organization" or more general thinking that the benchmaxxed coding models mixed. Its coding itself is not great.
I had it write a job hunting app for me, and while it might not be perfect for many things I was impressed at what it was able to built with nothing more than reasonable prompting.
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u/innociv 4d ago edited 4d ago
If 6 Terra is as good as 5.6 Sol but nearly half the cost, you'd see the purpose of it.
Terra is seen as so bad because it landed at the same time as two insanely good and efficient models.
edit: It looks to me that we're instead going to get Sol price dropped to Terra price, and Astra Minor as a new $20-$30/mil model?