It does feel like it has to be real. I've noticed it since chatGPT with GPT-3.5, once it hit big news publicly and demands were made on "censoring" its output to limit biases, etc. (not inherently a problem to do this with LLMs as a society, but it does affect the output for obvious reasons). Whatever workflow OpenAI and others have applied, seems to be post-release somehow? i'm ignorant and just speculating, but literally every model release i've noticed it. Starts strong, ends up feeling less capable days, weeks, months after. I'm sure some of it could be in the parallelization of processing that has to occur to service the large amount of requests. and more and more traffic are spreading it thin?

Capitalism is pure scam now on every level: they did this with nvme drives in the last couple years. Sending out perfect hardware to reviewers then rug pulling trash to ship to the world