I'd like to have AI act as a teacher to help explain technical concepts. It's invaluable to be able to ask a question of someone who already has an understanding. It speeds up my learning by an insane amount compared to just reading technical documents. It would be better to have a person with expertise to answer questions that I have, but the tradeoff is that their time is valuable and they have a certain amount of patience as a human. AI models are always there and they don't get impatient.
I'm trying out the current free models and it's such a frustrating experience though. Sometimes they'll have a good answer, but it's also obvious that they don't really know what they're talking about at all. I'll try to run an idea by them and they'll tell me my reasoning is sound, just for me to wake up the next day and realize I made fundamental mistake due to being tired and my reasoning wasn't sound at all. I'll try to elaborate on my understanding and they'll call me out on stuff that wasn't even wrong. I'll ask about something they explained and they'll just say "yes that was a direct contradiction of what I said before, I was wrong before". I've felt more confused a couple of times because I have to sort out what they're wrong about on top of actually learning the thing.
I'm wondering, are the paid versions much more reliable? I know people are using them to develop software which maybe they're just better at than explaining concepts. I can't be the only one who wants to use AI as a teacher or has encountered this before though, so do you guys have any advice whether there's better ways I can prompt them or even if it's "yeah just used the paid model"?