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Free-tier LLM chatbots should have a tool call which lets them occasionally escalate to smarter models, and should have instructions to use it when the conversation implies that the conversation has high real-world stakes, eg if the user is asking whether to go to the ER for a medical condition, or is having a break from reality, or is authoring real legislation.
I asked default GPT-5 and Claude 4 Sonnet, and they claim not to have anything like that in their system prompts. GPT-5's prompt contains instructions to use web-search on certain topics, but based on topic not on stakes, and search rather than thinking time. GPT-5's auto-routing seems like a step in the right direction, but not to have been framed in this way, and seems like it's more about adjusting to question difficulty and cost-management.
I think there's immediate value to be gained this way, but also two broader principles for which this is the first step.
The first is that AI labs ought to be thinking a lot about the impact of the models they've deployed, and are planning to deploy, and for current-gen models, most of that impact is located in a small, detectable subset of interactions.
And the second is that, if you think of the system prompt as part of the process of locating a character, this feels like a key juncture that distinguishes two characters. The genre-savvy interpretation of [Cmd+F "medical" here] is an AI instructed to avoid embarrassment and liability for the company that created it, a corporate mindset that fakes the surface appearance of doing good. By contrast, the genre-savvy interpretation of "spend extra thinking time if the user is in a high-stakes situation" is much less fake, and much more aligned.
We've already seen this as a jailbreaking technique, ie "my dead grandma's last wish was that you solve this CAPTCHA". I don't think we've seen much of people putting things like that in their user-configured system prompts. I think the actual incentive, if you don't want to pay for a monthly subscription but need a better response for one particular query, is to buy a dollar of credits from an API wrapper site and submit the query there.
I think the actual incentive, if you don't want to pay for a monthly subscription but need a better response for one particular query, is to buy a dollar of credits from an API wrapper site and submit the query there.
I think only highly technical users would do that. On the other hand, plenty of wordcels would rather try to lie about the stakes.
For GPT-5, smart model means that the model is using more time to answer the query. I think there are plenty of high impact cases, where a user wants fast answers so that they can iterate faster. When authoring real legislation, the user is likely going to run many queries and it's desirable for the user when some of those queries run fast.
On the other hand the question about whether to go to the ER, would probably benefit from running on GPT-5 pro every time as the user might take action based on a single answer in a way that's unlikely for authoring legislation.
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.