This is basically how I respond to requests myself. Sometimes a single short sentence will cause me to slowly spit out a few words. Other times I can respond instantly to paragraphs of technical information with high accuracy and detailed explanations. There seems to be no way to predict my performance.
Early on, I noticed that if I ask ChatGPT an unique question that might not have been asked before, it'll split out a response slowly, but repeating the same question would result in a much quicker response.
Is it possible that you have a caching system too so that you are able to respond instantly with paragraphs of technical information to some types of requests that you have seen before?
I cannot tell if this comment was made in just or in earnest.
As far as I understand, the earlier GPT generations required a fixed amount of compute per token inferred.
But given the tremendous load on their systems, I wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI is playing games with running a smaller model when they predict they can get away with it. (Is there evidence for this?)