Comment by nulltrace
16 hours ago
Catching accidental drift is still worth a lot. It's basically the same idea as performance regression tests in CI, nobody writes those because they expect sabotage. It's for the boring stuff, like "oops, we bumped a dep and throughput dropped 15%".
If someone actually goes out of their way to bypass the check, that's a pretty different situation legally compared to just quietly shipping a cheaper quant anyway.
Also it's not just about running an obviously worse quant.
Running different GPU kernels / inference engines also matters. It's easy to write an implementation that is faster and thus cheaper but numerically much noisier / less accurate.
Yeah, the threat model is nonexistent. Most people use a dozen or so well known providers, who have no incentives to so obviously cheat.