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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.
by heaney-555 2mo ago
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.
- daemonologist 2mo agoGoing 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.
- johnsmith1840 2mo agoI 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.
- Tostino 2mo agoPeople tell these models everything. You don't think a pretty unethical company can figure out a way to monetize that?
- fragmede 2mo agoIf someone tells ChatGPT I'm cheating on my wife, sure, unethically they could blackmail the user but that seems like a stretch.
- aleph_minus_one 2mo ago> People tell these models everything. You don't think a pretty unethical company can figure out a way to monetize that? I assume research-level questions about scientific topics (with a focus on math and computer science) are not easy to monetize (yes, this is by far the most common kind of question to AI models for me). :-D
- ewild 2mo agoI guarantee you're a lot easier to manipulate than you think.
- aleph_minus_one 2mo ago> I guarantee you're a lot easier to manipulate than you think. I can imagine some hypothetical scenarios, but I do believe that I have strong evidence that this is mostly not the case. For example, I think I have already told the story how when I worked together with a person who is a business consultant (and thus salesman) told me that C-level executives are an incredibly easy sales target compared to me. For him, selling something to me was "ultra-hard mode", basically because I could immediately see through every sales tactic that he tried on me.
- tokioyoyo 2mo agoAds.
- stymaar 2mo agoAds 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.
- tokioyoyo 2mo agoIn about 4 months, OpenAI’s fundraiser decks will leak, which will include their current ad revenue.
- livinglist 2mo agoIs this a promise or speculation?
- mlvljr 2mo ago[dead]
- kristofferR 2mo ago90+% 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.
- aleph_minus_one 2mo ago> 90+% of queries are probably so common/evergreen that, if a cheaper model made all the different language vari[a]nts and ways of asking the question into one query, they could be cached quite effectively. As I wrote in some parallel post: "When I look at my history with AI chatbots, 90 % of the conversations revolve around research-level problems in math and computer science. :-D" For quite a few of them, creating a decent answer involved quite a bit of thinking by the AI, so I assume they are not the easiest queries to answer, and the queries are too obscure to cache.
- ramraj07 2mo agoEven a long while ago it was estimated that every Google search cost google several cents (and that they made back 10 cents). Google also uses AI for search results. Thus its not inconceivable that openai can make money here.
- johnsmith1840 2mo agoI typed wrong I mean I don't see how they will beat google. Google is the only true vertically integrated AI company meaning they own price at the bottom margins with their own chips and models made just for them.
- ekidd 2mo agoGoogle's public AI model lineup is pretty bad right now. Gemini 3.1 Pro is scoring worse than some mid-sized Chinese models at 1/20th the cost, and their Flash and Flash Light models are horrendously overpriced on task benchmarks compared to GPT 5.6 Luna or the mid-sized Chinese models. There's no reason why Google's public stuff is this stale, overpriced and underwhelming. But at least until their next round of models drops, even calling them a "frontier lab" is starting to feel like a stretch. Which is weird!
- willy_k 2mo agoThat doesn’t matter very much for the free tier market though. The game is to have something useable that is actually used, and that can be offered at sustainable margins. Google has significant advantages in those regards.
- eru 2mo agoIt's interesting that Google fell behind before and managed to get back up to the frontier. But, boy, is their performance in this race uneven. Especially considering that in the 2010s they were The Big AI company, especially after buying out boutique shops like DeepMind.
- m77 2mo agoIts good for Google to signal to all the dicks on Youtube and elsewhere that they do not compete with anyone.
- gavinray 2mo agoI'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.
- crab_galaxy 2mo agoIs that really accurate though? I use Claude in my software job but the majority of my friends do not use it at all. And I never use it for anything other than that either. TBH I don’t find it useful at all for personal use. It’s totally soulless for creative ventures and absolute dogshit at researching the things I want it to be good at (I.e. planning a vacation or finding new music). All that combined with the social stigma makes me feel pretty skeptical that it’s some kind of pop culture shaping mechanism, at least not for a few more years.
- fragmede 2mo agoWe're all in our own personal bubbles and extrapolating from there as normal, but ChatGPT has some 800 million users, most of them outside the US. Countries like the Philippines and Thailand. I don't think they're all vibecoding the hottest new SaaS app but maybe they are.
- martheen 2mo agoEven the Philippines and Thailand are lower in per-capita usage compared to the US, most of the higher use are in Europe. Interestingly Australia & New Zealand are also pretty high, similar to Europe and far more than Asia & Africa in general, with the exception being Saudi Arabia (similar to US) and Israel (even higher than Australia). https://openai.com/signals/data https://openai.com/signals/data
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- thorum 2mo agoFree 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.
- heaney-555 2mo agoTechnically 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".
- in-silico 2mo agoDoes the free tier really not have access to reasoning models? That would explain a lot of the terrible AI/LLM takes online.
- heaney-555 2mo agoThe free tier of ChatGPT is powered by GPT-5.5 Instant, a non-reasoning version of GPT 5.5.
- fragmede 2mo agoYes. Go to chat.com in an incognito window and ask it the same question that you ask 5.6-sol with thinking max, and compare. Depending on the question there is or is not a huge difference.
- qingcharles 2mo agoAlso, remember the bulk of AI users are using free models, getting terrible answers, and wondering why people keep saying AI is going to take everybody's jobs away.
- vitorgrs 2mo agoThere was already thinking in free model though. They removed the option a while ago and made it automatic... But you could force by just saying "think hard" or whatever.
- whazor 2mo agoEspecially with tool calling. This could be the Opus 4.5 moment for normal humans.