Ask HN: Is there a free equivalent of ChatGPT today?

I'm an early adopter and paying customer of ChatGPT but I keep hearing that several other models managed to catch up. I use it 1-2 times a day to satisfy my personal and professional curiosity (so it would be nice if it could be more or less up to date on contemporary cloud platform engineering).

I tried using built-in AI in Bing but it's answers feel very shallow (I assume it is ChatGPT-based but is very token-/resource-restricted).

Is there a way to send those 300 bucks a year to an ETF and use a free service?