I use LLMs every day as a search engine replacement, but I’m concerned about this because there’s a vast gulf of capabilities between different models, or even the same models with different reasoning depths.

Back in the day everyone had essentially the same Google, and there was no concept of paying to get better search results. But now the average family is going to rely on the ad-ridden ChatGPT Free tier which is more likely to be wrong, less in depth, with additional commercial incentives. It’s only a minority of adults now that pays for frontier models, and how many are letting their children have access?

You can see this divide right now with medical advice for instance. If you have access to ChatGPT 6 Pro (only available for the $100/month tier I think), it will research Pubmed etc and give you a careful measured answer that likely reflects the latest medical consensus, while a casual user relying on Google AI might be told to eat toilet paper to relieve constipation: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1wmbn87/a_pt_show...