With how competitive the LLM field is, it would surprise me greatly if any of these players were doing anything other than trying to make the best possible product. I certainly do not believe they are intentionally training the models to use more tokens unnecessarily.

Are you implying they can’t do both?

Yes, those things are mutually exclusive.

Theyre training the system to minimize compute,so most likely theyre dynamically downgrading quants in the first few turns hoping to find the cheapest model to run. The side effect may be excessive token gen

Sure. That’s possible. But that’s not what I was talking about.

Tomato, technical tomato

You're joking, right? That's an incredibly outmoded view of capitalist "competition."

There is a theory that the verbosity and comments help getting better results with the current benchmarks. So the models are theoretically getting better but in practice they are getting worse.

I believe they are genuinely getting better for fully autonomous tasks. Anthropic seems to have gone all in on this, at the expense of more typical usage patterns.