OpenAI's Internal Juice Budget Reportedly Shifts

johnseach · x · 2026-07-13

This post explains the so-called juice values: hidden internal budgets that dictate how much "thinking compute" a model can spend per request.

Higher juice allows the model to perform more reasoning steps, usually performing better on complex problems, but it's slower and more expensive.
Lower juice means faster, cheaper responses, but weaker performance on multi-step reasoning tasks.
The community often "probes" these values using specific diagnostic prompts, especially within Codex-related environments.
The post also claims that the maximum juice for GPT-5.6 Sol was recently slashed from around 960 to 128 as part of efficiency optimizations, while Terra and Luna retained higher budgets.

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