I wonder if the providers are doing everyone, themselves included, a huge disservice by providing free versions of their models that are so incompetent compared to the SOTA models that these types of q&a go viral because the ai hype doesn't match the reality for unpaid users.

And it's not just the viral questions that are an issue. I've seen people getting sub-optimal results for $1000+ PC comparisons from the free reasoning version while the paid versions get it right; a senior scientist at a national lab thinking ai isn't really useful because the free reasoning version couldn't generate working code from a scientific paper and then being surprised when the paid version 1-shotted working code, and other similar examples over the last year or so.

How many policy and other quality of life choices are going to go wrong because people used the free versions of these models that got the answers subtly wrong and the users couldn't tell the difference? What will be the collective damage to the world because of this?

Which department or person within the provider orgs made the decision to put thinking/reasoning in the name when clearly the paid versions have far better performance? Thinking about the scope of the damage they are doing makes me shudder.

How much is the real (non-subsidized) cost of the "paid" plans? Does anyone in the world have an answer for this?

I used a paid model to try this. Same deal.

I don't think 100% adoption is necessarily the ideal strategy anyways. Maybe 50% of the population seeing AI as all powerful and buying the subscription vs 50% of the population still being skeptics, is a reasonable stable configuration. 50% get the advantage of the AI whereas if everybody is super intelligent, no one is super intelligent.

Their loss