> Could there be a benefit to releasing a new model, slowly dumbing it down over a couple months, then releasing a new model that’s marginally if at all better than the original to create a perceived improvement when in reality there isn’t really one?

Not unless your competitors do the same, or else you will only be perceived as falling behind others.

Yes that makes sense. In my hypothetical, the industry frontier is stagnating, meaning no one is making big breakthroughs, so they all resort to this.

If one lab makes a breakthrough, can the other labs just distill to bear parity anyways and then set a new baseline industry wide.

I’m quite ignorant on this topic, so if any of this sounds moronic, forgive me