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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

This is intentional? I think delivering lower quality than what was advertised and benchmarked is borderline fraud, but YMMV.

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Per Anthropic’s RCA linked in Ops post for September 2025 issues:

“… To state it plainly: We never reduce model quality due to demand, time of day, or server load. …”

So according to Anthropic they are not tweaking quality setting due to demand.

And according to Google, they always delete data if requested.

And according to Meta, they always give you ALL the data they have on you when requested.

>And according to Google, they always delete data if requested.

However, the request form is on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'.

What would you like?

An SLA-style contractually binding agreement.

I bet this is available in large enterprise agreements. How much are you willing to pay for it?

Priced in.

I guess I just don't know how to square that with my actual experiences then.

I've seen sporadic drops in reasoning skills that made me feel like it was January 2025, not 2026 ... inconsistent.

I wouldn't doubt that these companies would deliberately degrade performance to manage load, but it's also true that humans are notoriously terrible at identifying random distributions, even with something as simple as a coin flip. It's very possible that what you view as degradation is just "bad RNG".

yep stochastic fantastic

these things are by definition hard to reason about

LLMs sample the next token from a conditional probability distribution, the hope is that dumb sequences are less probable but they will just happen naturally.

It's more like the choice between "the" and "a" than "yes" and "no".

Funny how those probabilities consistently at 2pm UK time when all the Americans come online...

That's about model quality. Nothing about output quality.

Thats what is called an "overly specific denial". It sounds more palatable if you say "we deployed a newly quantized model of Opus and here are cherry picked benchmarks to show its the same", and even that they don't announce publicly.

Personally, I'd rather get queued up on a long wait time I mean not ridiculously long but I am ok waiting five minutes to get correct it at least more correct responses.

Sure, I'll take a cup of coffee while I wait (:

i’d wait any amount of time lol.

at least i would KNOW it’s overloaded and i should use a different model, try again later, or just skip AI assistance for the task altogether.

They don't advertise a certain quality. You take what they have or leave it.

> I think delivering lower quality than what was advertised and benchmarked is borderline fraud

welcome to the Silicon Valley, I guess. everything from Google Search to Uber is fraud. Uber is a classic example of this playbook, even.

If there's no way to check, then how can you claim it's fraud? :)

There is no level of quality advertised, as far as I can see.

What is "level of quality"? Doesn't this apply to any product?

In this case, it is benchmark performance. See the root post.

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