GPT-5.2

In my experience, the best models are already nearly as good as you can be for a large fraction of what I personally use them for, which is basically as a more efficient search engine.

The thing that would now make the biggest difference isn't "more intelligence", whatever that might mean, but better grounding.

It's still a big issue that the models will make up plausible sounding but wrong or misleading explanations for things, and verifying their claims ends up taking time. And if it's a topic you don't care about enough, you might just end up misinformed.

I think Google/Gemini realize this, since their "verify" feature is designed to address exactly this. Unfortunately it hasn't worked very well for me so far.

But to me it's very clear that the product that gets this right will be the one I use.

Grounding in search results is what Perplexity pioneered and Google also does with AI mode and ChatGPT and others with web search tool.

As a user I want it but as webadmin it kills dynamic pages and that's why Proof of work aka CPU time captchas like Anubis https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis#user-content-anubis or BotID https://vercel.com/docs/botid are now everywhere. If only these AI crawlers did some caching, but no just go and overrun the web. To the effect that they can't anymore, at the price of shutting down small sites and making life worse for everyone, just for few months of rapacious crawling. Literally Perplexity moved fast and broke things.