It would happen if they quietly decide to serve up more aggressively distilled / quantised / smaller models when under load.

They advertise the Opus 4.5 model. Secretly substituting a cheaper one to save costs would be fraud.

	▲	kingstnap 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Old school Gemini used to do this. It was super obvious because mid day the model would go from stupid to completely brain dead. I have a screenshot of Google's FAQ on my PC from 2024-09-13 that says this (I took it to post to discord): > How do I know which model Gemini is using in its responses? > We believe in using the right model for the right task. We use various models at hand for specific tasks based on what we think will provide the best experience.