Model retirement
Also called model deprecation, deprecated model, retired model
When an AI company removes an older model from its app or API, so nobody can choose it and chats move to a newer one.
AI models don't last. Each new one costs money to run alongside the old, so companies retire older models, sometimes within a year or two of launch. In the app, the old name disappears from the picker and your chats carry on with whatever replaced it.
Usually nobody notices. Sometimes people do. When OpenAI first replaced GPT-4o, enough users objected to the change in its personality that it was brought back for a while before being retired for good.
For anyone who has built habits, prompts or a business on one model, retirement is a reminder that the ground moves. Write down what good results look like, so you can tell quickly whether the new model still delivers them.
For example
A small business's carefully tuned prompts start giving different answers the week their model is retired and replaced.
Put it to use
Where you'll meet model retirement in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, how to use it there, and the mix-up most people make.
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