I seem to recall Anthropic going on record saying that they don't do anything to model performance to stretch their compute capacity. I've anecdotally noticed massive peaks and troughs in performance week to week (albeit with Opus, not Fable).
I wonder what their official explanation for this behavior is.
I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I notice flaws on day one of model releases. But I also notice improvements if the model is truly more advanced than what I’m used to. Then over time the same questions or tasks return worse results.
What is actually stopping these model companies from running a model at full capacity on release then once its name rings out, start serving users quantized garbage?
They are deploying optimizations weekly (if not daily) with various AB tests. They don't manipulate model performance, but they do actively perform tests.
Good point. I suppose watching the number go up is useful information in itself.
I have been using CC with DeepSeek 4.1 Flash lately, and it's nice to see how the sausage is being made (even if it's partly illusory, as CoT always is.)
Obviously. The standard pattern is that model X is basically AGI and wins all benchmarks, followed the next day by Y and Z, which both win all benchmarks, too.
Then weeks later people find out that they have been duped and complain that the models have been quantized or employ worse inference.
Buy decent coffee instead of your $200 subscription and sidestep all the scams.
Well I happen to enjoy coffee and $200 AI plans. What if Blue Bottle started watering down it's coffee? Is your answer to stop drinking coffee and make myself tea instead?
Evidence that vendors are being misleading in what they are delivering is important to share, whether or not you personally approve of that product.
Well sorry, still have to get decent AI somewhere. Productivity without AI is about 5x less. I am not comfortable with paying Chinese companies, and no Western companies provide subscription-based pricing for open models.
Anecdotally, I have found the same. I spend a lot of time with these frontier models, brainstorming, etc. and the drop in performance from, say, week 1 to week 8 is often massive. Whereas in the beginning, it seemed like a capable research assistant, by the end of week 8 or so it starts acting like a puppy dog eager to make its 'master' happy for a few treats.
The actual tokens might be non-deterministic, but you could look for proxy measures that are supposed to be invariant. Eg. correctness/performance on benchmarks, "thinking level" on complex problems, etc
I strongly believe that the real Fable is the one we had for a few days in June. Then they nerfed the model a bit after the government pulled it off the market. What we have now is something less, but still good
It is clear by now to me that Anthropic is constantly trying to find a kind of “auto” degradation perhaps to save money on work it thinks does not require high reasoning. I always use max reasoning and I can clearly see differences between the models when they release and after 3-4 weeks. I think they give a kind of intelligence boost also for new accounts.
Just yesterday I was thinking about gpt-5.6-luna. I made it my default model in Hermes during its fist week of launch. It was just as good as 5.5 which was my previous default. But over the last 2 or 3 weeks I've seen how dumb it is now. I have to be very explicit with it.
For example, I used to be able to prompt "Check the system logs on <server> for...." and it would just figure it out. Yesterday I asked "Did <service> on <server> complete the overnight job" and all it said was "that service is not installed on my host"
I had to tell it to ssh into the server and run journlctl to check it
Anecdotal, I know, but they all seem to be less capable with time.
The smart takeaway is not skepticism or snark, but understanding that once the new datacenter buildout starts coming online, cheap and widespread access to even the current frontier models (without strict thinking limits) will blow the economy wide open.
(ie, even a pause in AI training isn't going to stop the train where AI flips the economy upside down, we've barely even seen the impact of the current frontier)
The question I have is this only happening for a subset of users working in specific areas, such as AI or distributed systems (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48742153), or is this across the board? I am working on distributed systems. Today Fable is mostly unusable. It resembles Opus, so I went looking to see if anyone else is having issues. Sure enough.
I work in embedded systems. I have seen the same thing happening day by day from Opus. Some days it’s okay to use and performs well. Other days I have to correct it repeatedly and remind it of information already in the prompt earlier (before compaction!) and still other times it’s infuriatingly stupid.
It’s a slot machine for what they’re actually giving us behind the opaque paywalls.
I have no hard data but I have a strong feeling this morning that something's wrong with Fable 5 compared to Friday evening.
Just an hour ago I had Fable correctly identify an unused method that could be deleted. I then immediately get a diff for an exact duplicate method, and then Fable outputting, "I accidentally duplicated <method> instead of deleting it. Removing both copies now."
The remaining morning complaints that makes it feel like something's off is that it will do a lot of "thinking" for simple things that previously took very little time. And it got very lost and completely mixed up DE-91M predicate names and implementations. Just absolute disaster code that I had over the past months come to generally expect it to do without issue.
Glad I carefully review everything. I think what I need is reliability and consistency. But it feels like picking a model from the list doesn't guarantee that: that the models' "brain" is open on the table and they're screwing with it.
Gemini Chat is constantly throwing, "Pro is in high demand right now, a different model was used for this generation," too.
I'm thinking they're all running out of physical resources. It's the DotCom bubble all over again; rollout of the physical infrastructure that's necessary to keep all of the pie-in-the-sky promises will not happen on the timescales that investors can work with, and they will panic when they realize this.
EDIT: And, frankly, I can't wait. I'm tired of the sketchy and dishonest way these companies are behaving.
This is like shared clouds back in the day where if someone is using the CPU more it impacts you, just pool every one to the same service. There should be an SLA but for the intelligence of these models, otherwise, you are sold fable but with the intelligence of a table.
This is a project i wanted to implement for a long time. It regularly benchmarks cloud hosted models with private benchmarks.
Not just openai & anthropic, popular openrouter models too.
Tests their intelligence, not their diligence.
Sadly i cant think of a way to monetize the service. Also if it ever gets famous enough labs would try to game the system, it would be cat&mouse game that i am not willing to waste time on without any monetary gain.
So in 5 years will they lose a suit for intentionally deceiving users? Or is something baked into the ToS by now that allows them to adjust things like this?
I've followed a few trackers, eg https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ , for awhile. For Claude Code the trend, it seems to me at least, is fewer tokens to do the same or better job. Prompt changes, tool ergonomics changes, etc.; I'd be shocked if they didn't A/B every release. Less thinking as measured by tokens isn't necessarily bad if you can get the same results by making it think about the "right" things or structure. They obviously screw up sometimes, and I've always been suspicious with hidden tokens, but I haven't found evidence quality intentionally degrades over time.
I seem to recall Anthropic going on record saying that they don't do anything to model performance to stretch their compute capacity. I've anecdotally noticed massive peaks and troughs in performance week to week (albeit with Opus, not Fable).
I wonder what their official explanation for this behavior is.
Last time they were called out, it was a regression in Claude code itself.
At least that's their explanation. Either way, it wasn't a good look for "vibecoding" but it got brushed over.
When something is new, its capabilities feel incredible. Over time, those same capabilities become mundane, and you start to notice the flaws.
(Now, if TFA is actually measuring reasoning tokens, that's quite different! It's not entirely obvious to me how he is measuring.)
I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I notice flaws on day one of model releases. But I also notice improvements if the model is truly more advanced than what I’m used to. Then over time the same questions or tasks return worse results.
What is actually stopping these model companies from running a model at full capacity on release then once its name rings out, start serving users quantized garbage?
They are deploying optimizations weekly (if not daily) with various AB tests. They don't manipulate model performance, but they do actively perform tests.
They did. More than once...
Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o...
But it's still happening: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/81759
How do you measure thinking tokens? They don't send those back to the client.
They tell you how many tokens are used, however, right? Otherwise you couldn't see your own token consumption.
Good point. I suppose watching the number go up is useful information in itself.
I have been using CC with DeepSeek 4.1 Flash lately, and it's nice to see how the sausage is being made (even if it's partly illusory, as CoT always is.)
Obviously. The standard pattern is that model X is basically AGI and wins all benchmarks, followed the next day by Y and Z, which both win all benchmarks, too.
Then weeks later people find out that they have been duped and complain that the models have been quantized or employ worse inference.
Buy decent coffee instead of your $200 subscription and sidestep all the scams.
You forgot a stage or two:
1: "Our model will bring about the end of all things. Flee, flee for your lives"
2: "Our model is basically AGI"
3: "Our model will be available in limited release next week"
4: "Everybody who subscribes at the $200 level gets access now"
5: "Everybody who subscribes at the $20 level gets access now"
6, at least at Google: "Our model will be shoved down your throat every time you do a search, whether you want it or not"
0. "our model is too dangerous to release to pubic"
Google's search AI actually its too dangerous to release to the public. I have relatives routinely citing it as their source for medical advice.
I have quite strongly told them, in no uncertain terms, that they are going to kill themselves doing that.
Be sure to eat plenty of rocks in your daily diet, they are chock full of valuable minerals!
Well I happen to enjoy coffee and $200 AI plans. What if Blue Bottle started watering down it's coffee? Is your answer to stop drinking coffee and make myself tea instead?
Evidence that vendors are being misleading in what they are delivering is important to share, whether or not you personally approve of that product.
Well sorry, still have to get decent AI somewhere. Productivity without AI is about 5x less. I am not comfortable with paying Chinese companies, and no Western companies provide subscription-based pricing for open models.
Anecdotally, I have found the same. I spend a lot of time with these frontier models, brainstorming, etc. and the drop in performance from, say, week 1 to week 8 is often massive. Whereas in the beginning, it seemed like a capable research assistant, by the end of week 8 or so it starts acting like a puppy dog eager to make its 'master' happy for a few treats.
How do you create repeatable tests in a non-deterministic system? Every time you send the same prompt you get a different answer.
The actual tokens might be non-deterministic, but you could look for proxy measures that are supposed to be invariant. Eg. correctness/performance on benchmarks, "thinking level" on complex problems, etc
This is a good overview of how this is done: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/demystifying-evals-for...
I strongly believe that the real Fable is the one we had for a few days in June. Then they nerfed the model a bit after the government pulled it off the market. What we have now is something less, but still good
It is clear by now to me that Anthropic is constantly trying to find a kind of “auto” degradation perhaps to save money on work it thinks does not require high reasoning. I always use max reasoning and I can clearly see differences between the models when they release and after 3-4 weeks. I think they give a kind of intelligence boost also for new accounts.
Just yesterday I was thinking about gpt-5.6-luna. I made it my default model in Hermes during its fist week of launch. It was just as good as 5.5 which was my previous default. But over the last 2 or 3 weeks I've seen how dumb it is now. I have to be very explicit with it.
For example, I used to be able to prompt "Check the system logs on <server> for...." and it would just figure it out. Yesterday I asked "Did <service> on <server> complete the overnight job" and all it said was "that service is not installed on my host"
I had to tell it to ssh into the server and run journlctl to check it
Anecdotal, I know, but they all seem to be less capable with time.
_edit_ I use the same reasoning level of `medium`
The smart takeaway is not skepticism or snark, but understanding that once the new datacenter buildout starts coming online, cheap and widespread access to even the current frontier models (without strict thinking limits) will blow the economy wide open.
(ie, even a pause in AI training isn't going to stop the train where AI flips the economy upside down, we've barely even seen the impact of the current frontier)
Anthropic is straight up scamming its users at this point.
The question I have is this only happening for a subset of users working in specific areas, such as AI or distributed systems (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48742153), or is this across the board? I am working on distributed systems. Today Fable is mostly unusable. It resembles Opus, so I went looking to see if anyone else is having issues. Sure enough.
I work in embedded systems. I have seen the same thing happening day by day from Opus. Some days it’s okay to use and performs well. Other days I have to correct it repeatedly and remind it of information already in the prompt earlier (before compaction!) and still other times it’s infuriatingly stupid.
It’s a slot machine for what they’re actually giving us behind the opaque paywalls.
Yes, I’m on a business subscription plan.
I have no hard data but I have a strong feeling this morning that something's wrong with Fable 5 compared to Friday evening.
Just an hour ago I had Fable correctly identify an unused method that could be deleted. I then immediately get a diff for an exact duplicate method, and then Fable outputting, "I accidentally duplicated <method> instead of deleting it. Removing both copies now."
The remaining morning complaints that makes it feel like something's off is that it will do a lot of "thinking" for simple things that previously took very little time. And it got very lost and completely mixed up DE-91M predicate names and implementations. Just absolute disaster code that I had over the past months come to generally expect it to do without issue.
Glad I carefully review everything. I think what I need is reliability and consistency. But it feels like picking a model from the list doesn't guarantee that: that the models' "brain" is open on the table and they're screwing with it.
New release of fable and opus 5.5 is pending and Anthropic is reallocating resources. Degradation always happens in transition, it sucks.
Opus 5.5 is being served under opus 5 right now.
Especially with the frequent releases aka version bumps.
Maybe they are jealous of Navier Stokes and try the Hodge conjecture with 80% of total compute at the expense of their customers.
Gemini Chat is constantly throwing, "Pro is in high demand right now, a different model was used for this generation," too.
I'm thinking they're all running out of physical resources. It's the DotCom bubble all over again; rollout of the physical infrastructure that's necessary to keep all of the pie-in-the-sky promises will not happen on the timescales that investors can work with, and they will panic when they realize this.
EDIT: And, frankly, I can't wait. I'm tired of the sketchy and dishonest way these companies are behaving.
They want transparency from everyone else but not for them ... you don't say.
This is like shared clouds back in the day where if someone is using the CPU more it impacts you, just pool every one to the same service. There should be an SLA but for the intelligence of these models, otherwise, you are sold fable but with the intelligence of a table.
This may be the result of someone at Anthropic not working urgently.
This is a project i wanted to implement for a long time. It regularly benchmarks cloud hosted models with private benchmarks. Not just openai & anthropic, popular openrouter models too.
Tests their intelligence, not their diligence.
Sadly i cant think of a way to monetize the service. Also if it ever gets famous enough labs would try to game the system, it would be cat&mouse game that i am not willing to waste time on without any monetary gain.
The only revenue model I for this is ads (like AI Stupid Level[0]). Or as a loss leader to get eyeballs to your service (like Margin Labs[1]).
EDIT: I forgot (and am shocked) that HN still doesn't seem to support Markdown-style links.
[0] https://aistupidlevel.info/
[1] https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/
I mean I think if this is done well, lots of companies would pay for access to that data. Think like Enterprise subscriptions.
Its similar to other data services I see around my F500 company.
So in 5 years will they lose a suit for intentionally deceiving users? Or is something baked into the ToS by now that allows them to adjust things like this?
I've followed a few trackers, eg https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ , for awhile. For Claude Code the trend, it seems to me at least, is fewer tokens to do the same or better job. Prompt changes, tool ergonomics changes, etc.; I'd be shocked if they didn't A/B every release. Less thinking as measured by tokens isn't necessarily bad if you can get the same results by making it think about the "right" things or structure. They obviously screw up sometimes, and I've always been suspicious with hidden tokens, but I haven't found evidence quality intentionally degrades over time.