AI Model Timeline

Major providers typically release significant updates every 3-6 months. OpenAI and Anthropic tend to release flagship models annually with minor versions in between. Google has accelerated releases with Gemini updates. Incremental improvements, new model sizes, and specialized variants come more frequently.

Most providers deprecate older models 6-12 months after replacements launch. OpenAI maintains a deprecation schedule on their website. Anthropic retires older Claude versions once newer ones are stable. Check your provider's documentation for specific timelines and plan migrations proactively.

Not necessarily. Newer models often cost more and may be overkill for simple tasks. GPT-3.5-turbo and Claude 3 Haiku remain excellent choices for chatbots, summarization, and basic Q&A at a fraction of the cost. Reserve frontier models for complex reasoning, coding, or tasks requiring maximum accuracy.

Version suffixes indicate variants: "-mini" or "-small" are cheaper, faster versions; "-turbo" indicates optimized cost/performance; dated suffixes (like "-20240620") indicate specific snapshots. Preview versions may change before becoming stable. Always specify versions in production to avoid unexpected behavior changes.

Open-source models like Llama 3, Mistral, and Qwen have reached near-parity with commercial APIs for many tasks. They can be self-hosted for zero inference cost (only compute). The trade-off is managing infrastructure and lacking advanced features like function calling or vision in some variants.