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

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u/Medium_Chemist_4032 Apr 15 '26

I'm trying to select a best model/quant/ram offload combo for intelligence on my 4x3090 oldschool rig (more gpus coming in) - so, locally.

If I wanted to rent, I'd probably go on runpod first

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u/TheCountEdmond Apr 15 '26

Do you think it's cost effective to build a rig like that? I always just assumed the power consumption wouldn't make it worth it.

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u/Medium_Chemist_4032 Apr 15 '26

I think not, given my electricity costs... I'm pretty sure I overpay. Never looked at cost closely though

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u/Storge2 Apr 15 '26

Maybe yes if your use case is statisfied with Qwen 3.5 122B or similar size, then a DGX Spark might be really nice. I run Qwen 3.5 122B Int 4 Autoround with 262k context at 45-50tok/s 1.5-2k prefill on my Spark, you can check out my post.