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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

[delayed]

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?