The bleeding edge behind closed doors token burning monsters of 2023 are bad compared to the free LLMs we have now.
I believe it was Sundar in an interview with Lex who said that the reason they haven't developed another Ultra model is because by the time it is ready to launch, the flash and pro versions will have already made it redundant.
But then why does every new model release work great for a few weeks, then suddenly performance plummets? It's mysterious?