alt Hacker NewsIt's a "problem" of compute, I think. If you query without an account on ChatGPT you will see the model look up less stuff and research less, than when you have a paid account and choose "medium" or "high" in the effort slider.
Which makes sense, because of you have looked into search and crawlers you notice that search is actual quite expensive (which is why e.g. Kagi charges a few bucks for search every month).
It's not strictly compute, because this has noticeably improved in open-weight models too, such as Gemma and Qwen. I suspect they noticed this issue and adjusted their training to be better about it over time.