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...)
It's pretty typical that physical-goods manufacturing "optimizes the process" to cut costs during years 1 & 2 of manufacturing.
Ikea is notorious for this: The early Billy bookcase had heavier veneer and sturdier construction early on, and was actually a really good purchase for the money. The later years replaced veneer with paper foil, used thinner shelves, frames, and backing panels, and was just significantly weaker.
Amazon Basics is incredible in this regard, they’ve optimized SKU identification down to a pipeline. They’ll essentially randomly pick items off their internal list of highest netting sales and test them to see how dependent they are on brand name recognition and price-quality signalling. To do this as efficiently as possible, they simply purchase a few hundred units of a high quality product in the space, stick it in an Amazon Basics box and list it on their site under their Amazon Basixs brand at a price they feel they can achieve via white labeling, and wait to see how it sells. The use of high quality items (with quality above what can actually be had at the listed price point for the duration of the experiment) means they are really only testing the user base’s willingness to forgo a brand name for the category in exchange for a discount. If it sells well, they then work on sourcing it in bulk as a white labeled item “for real”, while if it sells poorly they simply delist and move on.
I (used to) buy pre-spliced/terminated fiber optic cables with some frequency from Amazon and came to be familiar with the brands and their quality. One time while shopping for some fiber optics, I saw Amazon Basics-labeled OM-3/OM-4 MMF cable at a very tempting price, so I purchased some to see if it was any good.
To my utter shock and surprise, when I received the trademark plain cardboard boxes with the Amazon Basics label on them and proceeded to open them, I found that I was sent boxes of cables still factory wrapped with labels that clearly read “Corning Optical” – which if you know anything about optical fiber, was pretty much the premium brand in the game. I should have stocked up because the next time I went to order I found out their experiment had ended and they no longer sold “Amazon Basics” finer cables.
Amazon Basics AA NiMH was well known to test exactly the same as the top Japanese brand 'Eneloop'. Extremely good specs all around
Recently though, they are still called Amazon Basics but no longer test like Eneloop. They've changed manufacturers for the worse and are hoping no one notices...
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...)
yencabulator · · focus · HN ↗
Ikea is notorious for this: The early Billy bookcase had heavier veneer and sturdier construction early on, and was actually a really good purchase for the money. The later years replaced veneer with paper foil, used thinner shelves, frames, and backing panels, and was just significantly weaker.
ComputerGuru · · focus · HN ↗
I (used to) buy pre-spliced/terminated fiber optic cables with some frequency from Amazon and came to be familiar with the brands and their quality. One time while shopping for some fiber optics, I saw Amazon Basics-labeled OM-3/OM-4 MMF cable at a very tempting price, so I purchased some to see if it was any good.
To my utter shock and surprise, when I received the trademark plain cardboard boxes with the Amazon Basics label on them and proceeded to open them, I found that I was sent boxes of cables still factory wrapped with labels that clearly read “Corning Optical” – which if you know anything about optical fiber, was pretty much the premium brand in the game. I should have stocked up because the next time I went to order I found out their experiment had ended and they no longer sold “Amazon Basics” finer cables.
dragontamer · · focus · HN ↗
Amazon Basics AA NiMH was well known to test exactly the same as the top Japanese brand 'Eneloop'. Extremely good specs all around
Recently though, they are still called Amazon Basics but no longer test like Eneloop. They've changed manufacturers for the worse and are hoping no one notices...
ComputerGuru · · focus · HN ↗
My example is like if you opened the Amazon Basics box and found Eneloop branded white/black/blue batteries directly.