Comment by jesse_dot_id
6 hours ago
The Office of Weights and Measures exists because, long before any of us were born, in 1836, companies were up to shady shit and consumers were paying for inconsistent products. I.E. Being scammed.
AI companies should be subject to the OWM like any other company that sells a product that varies in weight. Perhaps when a sane administration is re-elected; one that can read history books and comprehend why our regulations exist in the first place. Or have even a semblance of respect for its citizenry.
I doubt that would change the perception. Every model release is followed by accusations of nerfing.
There are several projects that repeat benchmarks on published models. None has ever found significant fluctations
Here's one example https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/
Fluctuations of a few percentage points are to be expected and should not surprise anyone who knows how LLMs work.
This Twitter analysis of Fable 5 is not that at all. They analyzed their coding sessions and blamed all of the fluctuations on Fable changing. They then compared to ARC-AGI-2 questions as the benchmark for thinking tokens and tried to stir up anger that coding turns don't produce as many thinking tokens as the ARC-AGI-2 problems.
This page has been in 'New model — collecting baseline data. Degradation detection paused.' state for months now. It seems to never say 'degraded'.
If you look at the graphs, the latest benchmarks are showing a pretty significant dip, and they match pretty well with some horrible experiences I've had in recent weeks. You can see token usage steadily going down, matching exactly what the author measured on his own.
> This page has been in 'New model — collecting baseline data. Degradation detection paused.' state for months now. It seems to never say 'degraded'.
Click the part at the end that says "View historical performance". They wait to collect more data about a new model before adding it to the overall charts.
The overall solution rate continues to climb when new models are considered.
> If you look at the graphs, the latest benchmarks are showing a pretty significant dip, and they match pretty well with some horrible experiences I've had in recent weeks. You can see token usage steadily going down, matching exactly what the author measured on his own.
The y-axis is amplified to make differences look larger than they are.
Hover over the dots to see the confidence interval. A 1-2% change means nothing.
4 replies →
It would change my perception but only if there were a competent and stringent administration in place. I didn't used to have to wonder if the ground beef I was buying was actually 1lb because there were inspections and repercussions, but stuff is kind of chronically underweight these days.
A properly run OWM enables you to stop wondering if you're being ripped off and that's what AI needs because I think it's incredibly easy to just assume we're being ripped off because these companies are all built on a foundation of wonton theft. (Not that I really care about that — I think all information should be free, but still.)
If you go to https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code-historical-perform... there is a very clear downwards trend in the two weeks before Opus 4.7 release. Then a sudden and dramatic drop seven days before Opus 4.8. And now we seem to have entered another decline in the last ten days, beyond the usual noise of Opus 5 scores
Anthropic terms of service:
> 12. General terms
> Changes to the Services. Our Services are novel and will change. We may sometimes add or remove features, increase or decrease capacity limits, offer new Services, or stop offering certain Services.
> Unless we specifically agree otherwise in a separate agreement with you, we reserve the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Services or your access to the Services, in whole or in part, at any time without notice to you. Although we will strive to provide you with reasonable advance notice if we stop offering a Service, there may be urgent situations—such as preventing abuse, responding to legal requirements, or addressing security and operability issues—where providing advance notice is not feasible. We will not be liable for any change to or any suspension or discontinuation of the Services or your access to them.
You're not buying a gallon of milk or a pound of flour. You're buying hosted software that the host reserves the right to modify.
You are not buying something and expecting it to be what's on the tin? Aka what the benchmarks show?
My comment is what is on the tin. As a consumer, yeah, I find this annoying. But do I want to bring the full force of government regulation on it? That's quite a strong reaction
1 reply →
THIS EXACTLY.
The only regulation that we need right now is the model that's on tap
Petition to rename them to the Office of Weights and Biases, haha.
I thought METR was supposed to fill this role?
... But what exactly is the "weight" metric you have in mind?