I hear a lot of accusations of nerfing as in, saying that the model itself has been quantized.

I doubt this is the case. I suspect all variation in quality and output can be explained in terms of prompt differences, and changing how much thinking happens at each level, as we see in the post above.

Suppose a company has a limited amount of compute. What do they then do if peak demand exceeds what they can provide? They don't turn off people's access...

And what about A/B testing? Anthropic doesn't even try to hide that they do this. Limited compute and A/B testing alone, would guarantee a nerfed experience some of the time. That is, you don't even need a nefarious reason.

I consider it gas lighting to deny model nerfing.

Na, surely effort level is silently degraded. Dead easy to do, impossible for anyone to verify, and very fine-grained so can be balanced perfectly with available compute.

Edit: maybe not impossible. Side channels perhaps.

It's been the same for every version the last year.

Oh, this Opus X.Y is incredible. Hmm... Now it's dumb. Rinse, repeat.

Doesn't really matter if the cause is quantization, system prompt changes, changes to thinking etc.

It's hard to see how continuously rug pulling users at every release is a good idea. Only reason I can fathom is that it's needed to keep costs inline.

Either that or it's some weird tweaking to the prompts to fix whatever. But given the prevalent sentiment that it's worse that sounds like a long shot

it's easy to suspect the hosting companies trying to do what they can to reduce cost-to-host up until the very threshold of perceptibility, so it's an easy guess to say they're probably doing something that shifts performance up or down between version releases..

but realistically I think you're right, it's prompt quality and the inherent non-determinism elements of LLMs showing up; when both of those things meet you get brain dead outputs.

Everyone likes to shout "slot machines! non-determinism!" until it actually explains something, heh.