Makes me think of [shepherd tones](Shepard tone - Wikipedia https://share.google/xooRbF7wIIhcsTt2J) which sounds like they're rising in pitch indefinitely

There are lots of benchmarks to compare the absolute values of different models on the same scale (as opposed to vibes, etc.).

The thought has definitely crossed my mind. I don't think it's true because there's definitely an improvement when new models are released.

Maybe the truth is the newest models aren't actually as impressive as we thought. Maybe our perception of progress is being manipulated via months of gradual, silent and unverifiable degradation.

Even if it's in the contract, but can't be verified.

They would quantize the model. That'd make it cheaper to run, and have slightly worse output but it would still generate outputs with a similar feel, derived from a compressed version of the same knowledge base etc.

They wouldn't even need to do this uniformly, quantized versions of the model could be routed only a subset of the requests. They could do this to nerf the old model, or more likely just to give themselves more hardware to run the new one on by handling more requests on less hardware. Or to handle increased request volume as traffic ramps up faster than hardware can be provisioned.

Playing with local models at various quants, the degradation can be hard to spot. Sometimes it's only noticeable in aggregate. And even then, you never really know if you just got unlucky with a bad response due to RNG.

I've had Opus 4.6 fall into some weirdly incoherent loops that I rarely see from even Sonnet, that felt like the kind of thing I got frequently with Qwen3.5 9B on local. And the above applies... Was that just bad RNG? Or was my request to Opus routed to some lower quality variant? There's no great way for me to tell for any given request, nor any way to guarantee Anthropic _didn't_ do that.

Weight quantization, n-expert capping, routing to smaller model, context window truncation, aggressive sampling constraints, lossy speculative decoding and probably more.

Use quantisation.

Current prices are insane but at this point I'm starting to feel like it's an existential issue. I'm not a US citizen. At any point the USA could come up with some arbitrary export controls. Not having a computer capable of running at least Qwen is starting to actually seem risky to me.

At least it's going to be usable as a very high end gaming PC.

At current "proprietary inference company behavior," investing in local inference sounds like the exceedingly far more rational option.

Long term predictability ought to far outweigh a few more cycles of performance.