They test it on launch day, then benchmark it against that. A deviation of above 10% is considered a change. They're currently tracking Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra.
This bench famously detected a degradation of Opus 4.6 which Anthropic later blogged about. I personally think people sense nerfs more often than they happen and that it's often about honeymoon effects.
Used to work on a chat app where we had full control of the stack from the GPUs to the chat interface and everything in between. We were a small team too so I could be pretty confident that nothing changed in the stack and we still regularly had users complain that this or that model got nerfed. Perceived performance is actual performance over expectations and the latter just keeps increasing over time.
It doesn’t mean the big labs don’t also nerf models! But if they didn’t you’d still have users complaining.
For years I used to buy ASICS running shoes. Every year they released a new model of each shoe: "Nimbus 23", then "Nimbus 24" the next year, etc. And every year people would complain in the user reviews about how each shoe was worse than the last.
I was like, wow, I guess the shoes must be literal torture devices full of MRSA-covered broken glass at this point. They've been getting continuously worse for 24 consecutive years!
Of course, what was really happening is that they were not getting worse, but naturally every year there was some small percentage of vocal dissatisfied users, while the silent majority simply enjoyed their shoes and didn't have much to say about them.
(The sorta-opposite happens in sneaker reviews as well. People will gush about how cushy the sole in some particular new sneaker is. Well, yeah, of course it's cushy -- you're comparing a new sneaker to your old sneaker where the foam had lost its bounce...)
Except for that one year when they completely swapped the meaning of the Cumulus line, which I think was 2008 with the cumulus 9 to 10 transition. It went from a neutral shoe that was good for people with high arches to more of a stiff stability shoe. The complainers aren't _always_ crazy. :-) (That doesn't mean the cumulus 10 was worse, of course, it just was a more substantial change that affected the type of runner the shoe was designed for.)
Wow the old grumpiness that lingers in my head from losing my favorite shoe. Who knew? Now I'm old and heavier and run in the Nimbus and am happy again. But you're right, of course, that most of the model changes are just fine and people like to complain.
jug · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.bridgebench.ai/nerf-bench" rel="nofollow">https://www.bridgebench.ai/nerf-bench
They test it on launch day, then benchmark it against that. A deviation of above 10% is considered a change. They're currently tracking Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra.
This bench famously detected a degradation of Opus 4.6 which Anthropic later blogged about. I personally think people sense nerfs more often than they happen and that it's often about honeymoon effects.
nsarrazin · · focus · HN ↗
It doesn’t mean the big labs don’t also nerf models! But if they didn’t you’d still have users complaining.
booty · · focus · HN ↗
I was like, wow, I guess the shoes must be literal torture devices full of MRSA-covered broken glass at this point. They've been getting continuously worse for 24 consecutive years!
Of course, what was really happening is that they were not getting worse, but naturally every year there was some small percentage of vocal dissatisfied users, while the silent majority simply enjoyed their shoes and didn't have much to say about them.
(The sorta-opposite happens in sneaker reviews as well. People will gush about how cushy the sole in some particular new sneaker is. Well, yeah, of course it's cushy -- you're comparing a new sneaker to your old sneaker where the foam had lost its bounce...)
dgacmu · · focus · HN ↗
Wow the old grumpiness that lingers in my head from losing my favorite shoe. Who knew? Now I'm old and heavier and run in the Nimbus and am happy again. But you're right, of course, that most of the model changes are just fine and people like to complain.