That's why I like qwen3.6 27B, it has 0 ego, it knows that it doesn't have complete world knowledge, so when it sees a web_search tool it searches all the time. Even qwen3.5 9B is mostly search-eager (but given the size, it's weaker on reasoning on the results if that's needed). I use a stock pi harness with only web_search and web_fetch (cleans up the html to only keep text) tools defined.

I have given up on making Opus actually retrieve online information for me. At this point I only query it side by side with qwen to laugh at how it didn't even attempt to search properly, and how a small local model is beating it every time. Gemini is very fast for searching, but somehow miss-sources all the time.

> I know open models have gotten quite good in many tasks such as coding or composition, but are there any that can access the internet and retrieve data like ChatGPT, Claude, etc can?

The things you describe are just tool calling, they're a feature of whatever harness you use. Use OpenCode, pi.dev, or maki.sh with any of the open models.

> I do have to admit I have recently begun wishing I could pay five dollars a month for a "just answer the fucking question" plan that would give me results without the guardrails and without the constant simpering and ego-stroking. I keep finding myself going a quick evaluation of "is it faster for me to skim search results myself or to construct an elaborate narrative to make an AI give me a real answer".

You can do most of this with some system prompts added to whatever agent you're using. You can do it from the settings on the claude/chatgpt websites too. (minus the no-guardrails thing)

Just go to kimi.com and try for yourself (not affiliated, but happy user).

First time I did this I realized in 5 seconds that the big players weren’t going to be carving up the market between them.

There are tons of existing Skills/MCPs for Google/Kagi/whatever search, and making your own is trivial. I gave DeepSeek in Pi a link to Kagi API docs and asked it to add a web search skill, and it did that easily.

You can let the AI solve it itself, and then it will provide two solutions: implement a local search service (easily blocked), or purchase a Web Search API service

isn't that just in the harness?