[deaux]

Yes. Huge difference in quality in from-weights distilled knowledge vs something based on a search tool. If the LLM uses a search tool there's barely a difference between a 30B model and Opus or GPT 5.5, because it just bases its reply on the stuff that came up. Which is generally SEO junk.

Obviously with the last example I'm not talking about long-running agentic tasks here that involve many dozens of search calls (like the recent Erdos problem stuff).

And that doesn't even consider the extra content rot, the time it takes, the need for such an API and so on.

One of the biggest advantages Anthropic models have had over GPT was GPT's woefully outdated data cutoff. They finally improved on this with 5.5, but IIRC it took a year.