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...)
I wonder how much of that is caused by folks actually noticing actual degradation in product quality over time (whether or not this exact product is suffering from it).
Shrinkflation is a thing, which people suddenly started noticing in the past 5 years.
There's also "the Schlitz Mistake", which I've heard summarized as "most customers won't notice if you take your product's quality from A to B (or C), but they definitely will if you take it from A to J (or A to M)"
At this point I kinda assume that any company releasing year updates to a physical product that _doesn't_ take the opportunity to trim costs / reduce quality would be vulnerable to a shareholder lawsuit for leaving money on the table...
> "most customers won't notice if you take your product's quality from A to B (or C), but they definitely will if you take it from A to J (or A to M)"
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...)
MikeTheGreat · · focus · HN ↗
Shrinkflation is a thing, which people suddenly started noticing in the past 5 years.
There's also "the Schlitz Mistake", which I've heard summarized as "most customers won't notice if you take your product's quality from A to B (or C), but they definitely will if you take it from A to J (or A to M)"
At this point I kinda assume that any company releasing year updates to a physical product that _doesn't_ take the opportunity to trim costs / reduce quality would be vulnerable to a shareholder lawsuit for leaving money on the table...
m10i · · focus · HN ↗
Summarizes the video game industry pretty well