On September 20th a friend told me that he had as significant number of Anthropic credits that were about to expire and wondered about a use for them. I do not use their products because of their relentless commitment to depriving the public access to artificial intelligence (and particularly any AI that isn't acting on their behalf) and I strongly discourage anyone else from doing so. But since he was going to use the credits for something, I tried to think of a skut work task that would be of only idle curiosity and would not help advance their capability, enable a meaningful public announcement* for them, and was likely already probed by many others (so success would only be lottery effects). -- and basically just something so pointless I wouldn't want to waste my own compute grinding on it but might like to see the result.

So I recommended determining the origins of ECC seeds and base points. The agent worked continuously for many hours and did not uncover anything interesting that wasn't already known. I looked at the transcript and was struck by how idiotic the agent was-- significantly below the standard of intelligence I've come to expect from GLM running locally.

I'm not saying this to suggest that misanthropic hijacked someone elses work yet again-- this is an obvious question that many people have surely posed and success presumably depended on expert use (which was absolutely not applied in my friends example). But it does make me wonder if the company invisibly degraded the model performance.

[*] Seems I underestimated how trivial a result they'd bother trying to spin!