Why ChatGPT Might Be Lagging Today (June 10): A Chinese User’s Perspective
I suspect today’s sluggish performance of ChatGPT may be due to a surge in user activity, particularly from China. From my personal perspective as a Chinese user, this period—right after the national college entrance exam (Gaokao)—is what I’d call a prime window for AI benchmarking.
Let me explain why.
1. Gaokao Timing and Confidentiality The Gaokao took place from June 7 to June 9. Its questions are strictly classified before the exam and are only publicly released after it's over. Because of this secrecy, these questions are not included in any AI training dataset. That makes them an ideal benchmark to assess AI performance under truly unseen data.
As of today (June 10), many enthusiasts have likely already converted the questions into cleaner formats like LaTeX, making it easier to systematically test AI models. Importantly, unless you enable web access, most models cannot "cheat" by looking up recent answers, so this window gives a clearer view of raw model inference capabilities.
2. China’s AI Testing Culture In recent years, especially with the rise of reasoning-heavy models, it has become increasingly common for Chinese users and researchers to use Gaokao questions to evaluate an AI's problem-solving ability. Given the exam's prestige and complexity, it's a high-quality, culturally relevant benchmark. The first few days after the exam are considered the “golden hours” for such testing.
The most critical improvement this year is the significant enhancement in the problem-solving capabilities and logical reasoning abilities of the reasoning series models. For example, ChatGPT-O1, O1 Pro, O3, or O4-Mini-High. This also includes China's Qwen and DeepSee R1.
3. Broader Context: Infrastructure and Misunderstandings Some non-Chinese users might not understand how AI usage patterns differ across regions. For example, discussions on Reddit about torrent clients repeatedly downloading the same data miss the point that some Chinese users run monetized P2P services (PCDNs), and ISPs may track bandwidth ratios. While unrelated to Gaokao, this illustrates how the Chinese digital ecosystem often involves unique dynamics that outsiders might not immediately grasp.
Similarly, while it’s widely known that Chinese users rely on VPNs due to network restrictions, less attention is paid to issues like CGNAT and shared IP environments, which can distort perceptions of behavior at scale.
Conclusion
While this is purely speculation, I believe the post-Gaokao testing rush—combined with the confidentiality of the questions and the increasing desire to benchmark LLMs fairly—may be overloading servers like ChatGPT. This kind of event-specific traffic spike is rare but not surprising given the cultural and technical context.