Giving free ChatGPT users access to reasoning (the 'Think' toggle) will have a broader impact on the world than every new paid model and coding agent combined.
Giving free ChatGPT users access to reasoning (the 'Think' toggle) will have a broader impact on the world than every new paid model and coding agent combined.
Going from 5.5 Instant (which was noticeably bad) to 5.6 Luna is a big jump as well. OpenAI is probably the most prominent among the general public - an advantage in some respects but they're giving away a lot of free inference and thus have to use a pretty small model to do it.
I really don't see how they're going to be google here. The free tier is dominated by verticle integration and the platform that people use. Long term I imagine google wins the bottom of the market and I'd be suprised if they lost.
Ads.
Ads work when you can server $.01 worth of ads to a user for $.0001 of server cost. I fail to see how you can make it work when doing LLM inference which is significantly costlier than web search.
90+% of queries are probably so common/evergreen that, if a cheaper model made all the different language varients and ways of asking the question into one query, they could be cached quite effectively.
In about 4 months, OpenAI’s fundraiser decks will leak, which will include their current ad revenue.
People tell these models everything. You don't think a pretty unethical company can figure out a way to monetize that?
Does the free tier really not have access to reasoning models?
That would explain a lot of the terrible AI/LLM takes online.
The free tier of ChatGPT is powered by GPT-5.5 Instant, a non-reasoning version of GPT 5.5.
Free users have had access to reasoning for a while. o4-mini and the initial GPT-5 launch both included reasoning modes for free users.
They took away the button a few months ago and are now putting it back.
Technically yes, but the free usage equated to single-digit messages per day before the auto-downgrade. With GPT-5 it was just 1 message per day.
Perhaps I should have said "proper access".
I'm not sure people fully comprehend the trickle-down pop-culture/zeitgeist effects that LLM's are having/are going to have on humanity.
Because everyone now outsources much of their thinking and researching to LLM's, our collective culture + brain is shaped in a cyclical manner by using them.
It's the mechanical homogenization of culture and groupthink.