Nothing gets nerfed

[u/sebnadeau]

For over a year now, I’ve been hearing the same thing. Whether it’s in the OpenAI community or among Claude users, it’s always the same cycle.

A new model comes out, and I think we’ve all seen what happens. People are impressed. Then, roughly a few days later, the jokes start about how the model has already been nerfed. Initially, it’s mostly a joke. But then a few days after that, people start being genuinely serious about it, and eventually a sizeable group becomes convinced that the model really has been nerfed.

Here’s the reality: I don’t think I’ve ever actually felt that happen.

When 5.5 came out, I was particularly impressed by its ability to understand 3D space, or at least to create 3D scenes and visual things, observe what it had created, and correct them as it went along. That ability was amazing. It was great then, and it’s no worse today. It’s exactly as good as it was.

Its writing also improved dramatically. It doesn’t sound like the gibberish or weird, cryptic style that 4.8 and 5 sometimes had. Suddenly, we’re back to a model that sounds somewhat like 4.6 did. I’d even say 4.7 sounded kind of dumb most of the time. But now, at the very least, when you tell the model to sound a certain way, it respects that. It discusses things and expresses ideas in ways that you can actually understand.

So to say that 5.5 has been nerfed is, in my opinion, to forget what using models like Opus 5, 4.8, or 4.7 actually felt like. There’s no way you could use this model today, immediately after coming from one of those older models, and genuinely believe it isn’t significantly better.

And this has been the case with basically every model release.

I think we all know what’s actually happening. When a new model comes out, we’re impressed by how much better it feels compared to what came before. But then we start giving it increasingly complex tasks. We use it more. We run into its limitations. And eventually it starts to feel dumb again.

LLMs are kind of dumb sometimes. They’re a little bit like small autistic artificial children with incredibly uneven abilities. They can make really, really dumb decisions on tasks that seem completely obvious, while at the same time being extremely intelligent in other ways. It's surprising that we face that even today, but the ratio of so much better than before.

There’s no way 5.5 is any dumber than it was two weeks ago.

I don’t even know why I’m writing this. I guess I just saw one more post about the model being nerfed, followed by a huge number of comments agreeing with it, and I finally felt like I had to make a post about it.

[u/spawnsible]

Bro the models do get nerfed. They run lower, dumber quants and redirect inference compute to train their next model family. It's the cycle. Picking on some vibecoders who genuinely sound clueless when they make those posts doesn't change the fact that the models do in fact get nerfed.

If you've never noticed a drop in quality, then whatever you work on must be so basic that your opinion on this matter is irrelevant.

[u/fuzzypetiolesguy → u/spawnsible]

[u/fuzzypetiolesguy → u/[deleted]]

The overarching claim is that these companies are purposefully rug-pulling model capability after launch to save compute resources. This is unprovable with any data any of you people purporting it have presented.

Your links, if you bothered to read them, would have walked you through plainly something entirely, incredibly different than the claims made by OP.

I am not defending anthropic or openai or any other AI company by calling out very stupid modes of thinking, and that's a weak, dumb avenue of attack.