Comment by zarmin
6 hours ago
I would rather wait in a queue than be routed to a degraded model. And if they _have_ to degrade the models, then I wish they would fucking tell us. Instead, it's "I have a strong feeling".
That we have to guess at this is by far the worst part of the AI era. It feels like a dark cloud over my productivity. It makes my body tense for the entire day when it happens. Not healthy.
They have repeatedly said they do not ever intentionally reduce model quality and do not degrade in this way, and that a model version number is always the same.
But, of course, OP is an empirical claim to the contrary, and I'd be curious to see if anyone (who's been capturing data over these timeframes) can replicate the same results and if Anthropic has any comment.
Every official statement I've seen around this is careful to say that they "don't intentionally reduce model quality", which leaves plenty of room for "we adjusted some knobs and our evals show performance is materially the same".
However, I also agree that I haven't seen any robust data from someone tracking it daily/weekly. The handful of sites purporting to do this aren't even running it enough times to hit stat sig.
edit: someone linked one elsewhere in this thread called AI Stupid Level - they "run 7 trials instead of just 1". I don't blame them. Doing this in a statistically sound manner would cost a small fortune.
I kind of feel "reduce the amount of thinking tokens produced" would fall under degrading model quality.
In any case, I am willing to believe it's possible something degraded, but so far I have not seen any empirical evidence of it since the previous incident with the inference and harness bugs. I lean towards Anthropic probably not intentionally doing anything like this without disclosing it beforehand.
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