But a local model + good harness with a robust toolset will work for people more often than not.
The model itself doesn't need to know who was the president of Zambia in 1968, because it has a tool it can use to check it from Wikipedia.
They've usually been intended for ereader/off-grid/post-zombie-apocalypse situations but I'd guess someone is working on an llm friendly way to install it already.
Be interesting to know the tradeoffs. The Tienammen square example suggests why you'd maybe want the knowledge facts to come from a separate source.
ChatGPT free falls back to GPT-5.2 Mini after a few interactions.
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?
"when hostapd initializes 80211 iface over nl80211, what attributes correspond to selected standard version like ax or be?"
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.
Most users are fixing grammar/spelling, summarising/converting/rewriting text, creating funny icons, and looking up simple facts, this is all far from frontier model performance.
I've a feeling that if/when Apple release their onboard LLM/Siri improvements that can call out if needed, the vast majority of people will be happy with what they get for free that's running on their phone.
I think what "need" youspeak of is a bit of a colored statement.