Comment by daveguy
4 days ago
Have any of the models been deprecated? It seems like a deprecation plan and definition of timelines would be extraordinarily helpful.
I have not seen any sort of "If you're using X.122, upgrade to X.123, before 202X. If you're using X.120, upgrade to anything before April 2026, because the model will no longer be available on that date." ... Like all operating systems and hardware manufacturers have been doing for decades.
Side note, it's amusing that stable behavior is only available on a particular model with a sufficiently low temperature setting. As near-AGI shouldn't these models be smart enough to maintain consistency or improvement from version to version?
Yep, we have a page of announced API deprecations here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/deprecations
It's got all deprecations, ordered by date of announcement, alongside shutdown dates and recommended replacements.
Note that we use the term deprecated to mean slated for shutdown, and shutdown to mean when it's actually shut down.
In general, we try to minimize developer pain by supporting models for as long as we reasonably can, and we'll give a long heads up before any shutdown. (GPT-4.5-preview was a bit of an odd case because it was launched as a potentially temporary preview, so we only gave a 3-month notice. But generally we aim for much longer notice.)
On that page I don't see any mention of o3-mini. Is o3-mini a legacy model now which is slated to be deprecated later on?
Nothing announced yet.
Our hypothesis is that o4-mini is a much better model, but we'll wait to hear feedback from developers. Evals only tell part of the story, and we wouldn't want to prematurely deprecate a model that developers continue to find value in. Model behavior is extremely high dimensional, and it's impossible to prevent regression on 100% use cases/prompts, especially if those prompts were originally tuned to the quirks of the older model. But if the majority of developers migrate happily, then it may make sense to deprecate at some future point.
We generally want to give developers as stable as an experience as possible, and not force them to swap models every few months whether they want to or not. Personally, I want developers to spend >99% of their time thinking about their business and <1% of their time thinking about what the OpenAI API is requiring of them.