I wouldn't doubt that these companies would deliberately degrade performance to manage load, but it's also true that humans are notoriously terrible at identifying random distributions, even with something as simple as a coin flip. It's very possible that what you view as degradation is just "bad RNG".

yep stochastic fantastic

these things are by definition hard to reason about

LLMs sample the next token from a conditional probability distribution, the hope is that dumb sequences are less probable but they will just happen naturally.

It's more like the choice between "the" and "a" than "yes" and "no".

Funny how those probabilities consistently at 2pm UK time when all the Americans come online...