ChatGPT free falls back to GPT-5.2 Mini after a few interactions.
It's a deduction, not an assumption. Obviously it's "good enough" for "most people". Otherwise nobody would be using the free version of ChatGPT today.
I pay for a Claude subscription, but even then I sometimes downgrade to Sonnet or even Haiku when I need a quick answer.
I'd say it's better than nothing, which to me is not the same thing at all as "good enough".
For example, I believe most people would be better off with half the allowable queries per day, routed to a better model, but that's not an available product.
This is all on top of the (to me) insufferable tone of the non-thinking models, but that might well be how most users prefer to be talked to, and whether that's how these models should accordingly talk is a much more nuanced question.
Regardless of that, everybody deserves correct answers, even users on the free tier. If this makes the free tier uneconomical to serve for hours on end per user per day, then I'd much rather they limit the number of turns than dial down the quality like that.
Have you tried the free version of ChatGPT? It is positively appalling. It’s like GPT 3.5 but prompted to write three times as much as necessary to seem useful. I wonder how many people have embarrassed themselves, lost their jobs, and been critically misinformed. All easy with state-of-the-art models but seemingly a guarantee with the bottom sub-slop tier.
Is the average person just talking to it about their day or something?
You can try asking it the same question as Claude and compare the answers. I can guarantee you that the ChatGPT answer won't fit on a single screen on a 32" 4k monitor.
Claude's will.
"when hostapd initializes 80211 iface over nl80211, what attributes correspond to selected standard version like ax or be?"