Use the Best Paid Models You Can Afford (In Thinking Mode)

In the last article I wrote, I ended with:

My suggestions:

• Don’t rely on mainstream media and viral Tweets to form your impressions about the capabilities of AI; regularly use AI yourself and build your own opinions

• Use the latest models (ChatGPT 5.5, Claude Opus 4.7), in “Thinking” mode (not “Fast” mode). Use the paid models if you can afford them.

• Yes, you can afford them. In fact, you can’t afford to not use paid models.

In fact, a fairly important part of the article was the fact that the best, paid models do the right thing, but the cheap/open-source ones do not. When I wrote those things, I really wanted to say something like, “This should be obvious to anyone who’s been reading my articles”. And then I wanted to link to an article that said this. But I didn’t, because in all my previous articles, this advice was buried among other stuff.

Anyway, a reader, Ansh, wrote to me saying that he got a sense of deja vu while reading it, and decided to find out how often I’ve said it. So he asked his LLM:

using Navin Kabras RSS feed in exactly how many of his substack posts has he said this phrase “Use the latest models (ChatGPT 5.5, Claude Opus 4.7), in “Thinking” mode (not “Fast” mode). Use the paid models if you can afford them.” if not exactly then somewhat similar, give me a count across AIIQ and FutureIQ

Apparently, the answer is that I have said it lots of times!

Anyway, I felt the need to write the article, with the main message in the title itself, because the message is important; and so that every time in the future when I give this advice, I can link here. And, I’m sure I’ll have to keep saying this because people don’t listen.

In fact, I think that if you aren’t spending a few percent of your income on AI, you’re doing it wrong.