> it's widely believed they are doing something to degrade service quality (quantizing?) in order to stretch resources

God, I wish this inane bullshit would just fucking die already.

Models are not "degrading". They're not being "secretly quantized". And no one is swapping out your 1.2T frontier behemoth for a cheap 120B toy and hoping you wouldn't notice!

It's just that humans are completely full of shit, and can't be trusted to measure LLM performance objectively!

Every time you use an LLM, you learn its capability profile better. You start using it more aggressively at what it's "good" at, until you find the limits and expose the flaws. You start paying attention to the more subtle issues you overlooked at first. Your honeymoon period wears off and you see that "the model got dumber". It didn't. You got better at pushing it to its limits, exposing the ways in which it was always dumb.

Now, will the likes of Anthropic just "API error: overloaded" you on any day of the week that ends in Y? Will they reduce your usage quotas and hope that you don't notice because they never gave you a number anyway? Oh, definitely. But that "they're making the models WORSE" bullshit lives in people's heads way more than in any reality.