Indian man builds AI model that beats GPT-6 Astra at 150x lower cost

An Indian entrepreneur has developed an AI model designed to handle complex engineering tasks, claiming it can outperform leading AI models, including GPT-6 Astra, while costing a fraction of their price. Sam Pasupalak, co-founder and CEO of Skyfall AI, has introduced SKY-001, a model built to create engineering designs using computer-aided design (CAD) and building information modelling (BIM). According to Pasupalak, the model is faster, cheaper and more accurate than the leading AI systems his team tested.The model is the result of 18 months of work by the Skyfall AI team. Pasupalak announced it on X, sharing benchmark results to explain how it compares with other AI models. Sam Pasupalak announces SKY-001, an AI model built for engineering design. How SKY-001 AI model worksAI models can generate impressive designs and write code for complex products, but the results may not always include all the components needed to build them. SKY-001 aims to address this problem by planning a design in stages instead of generating the entire thing at once.For instance, when designing a complex product, the model first breaks it down into assemblies and individual components. It then maps out how each part should be built using visual representations, sketches and construction steps. The same approach can be used for building design. In BIM tasks, SKY-001 takes a building outline and breaks it down into individual units and rooms.Skyfall AI says this method helps the model handle complex projects involving hundreds or thousands of steps while keeping individual components consistent with the overall design.SKY-001 vs OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra: What the numbers say Pasupalak claims SKY-001 is between 51 and 125 times faster than the frontier models tested. He also says it is more than 150 to 210 times cheaper, depending on the comparison.In the CAD cost comparison shared by the founder, SKY-001 costs $0.005 per sample, compared with $0.75 for GPT-6 Astra. This puts the reported cost of running the task on GPT-6 Astra at 150 times that of SKY-001.The accuracy results show a much narrower difference. SKY-001 scored 79.7 percent on the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric, compared with 79.1 percent for GPT-6 Astra. IoU measures how closely an AI-generated result overlaps with a reference design.The figures come from Skyfall AI's own tests and have not been independently verified. The results relate to the specific engineering tasks tested and do not establish that SKY-001 performs better than general-purpose AI models across other uses.Who is Sam Pasupalak?Sam Pasupalak is an entrepreneur from Bhubaneswar, Odisha, who is now based in San Francisco, US. He is the co-founder and CEO of Skyfall AI, the company behind SKY-001.Pasupalak completed a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science at the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2011. He later pursued a master's degree in political science and government at the London School of Economics, completing it in 2019. His studies at Waterloo included artificial intelligence, robotics and human-computer interaction.Before starting Skyfall AI in 2025, Pasupalak co-founded Maluuba in 2011 and served as its CEO. The AI research startup was acquired by Microsoft in 2017. At Maluuba, he led researchers and engineers working on artificial intelligence and language understanding.- Ends