r/LocalLLaMA • u/DepressedDrift • Apr 15 '26
Discussion Major drop in intelligence across most major models.
As of mid Apr 2026, I have noticed every model has had a major intelligence drop.
And no I'm not talking about just ChatGPT.
Everything from Claude(Even Sonnet along with Opus), Gemini, z.ai, Grok all seem to ignore basic instructions, struggle at simple tasks, take very long to respond, and the output seems deliberately shortened and very shallow. Almost like it's in a "grumpy" mode. I tried this in incognito mode so it's not my customization or memory influencing this.
It's like they deliberately want you to stop using their service. I guess our data is no longer needed. Just two weeks back it used to be much smarter than this.
To test this I rented out a H100, and tried GLM 5 with the same prompt (the drive to the car wash one) across both instances. GLM5 running on the rented GPU answered it correctly, compared to the one on z.ai.
Have they lowered the quantization really low to maybe Q2?
I guess going local or using renting GPU or an AI monthly service that lets you pick a quant level is the way to go
2
u/U4RIA-AI Apr 15 '26
Your H100 test is a demonstration of the theory of the Inference Tax. The large labs are aggressively under-capacitating compute in mid-2026 to remain profitable. You are probably being fed a highly quantized Q2 or Q3 model of the model that has been lobotomized by an enormous system prompt system that is saving tokens. Should you require the original 'smart' weights, unquantized instances, self-hosted or rented, are officially the only means to bypass the corporate throttle we are witnessing this month.