Model Graveyard
Here lie the models that once were state-of-the-art.
Every deprecated, sunset, and abandoned AI model. Sorted by when they died. Some lasted years. Some barely made it past a single quarter. In this industry, impermanence is the only constant.
Lifespan visualization
Gemini 1.0 Pro
GoogleBorn
2023-12-06
Died
2025-02-15
Lifespan
437 days
Replaced By
Gemini 2.0 Flash
Cause of Death
Gemini 2.0 series made 1.0 obsolete. Faster, cheaper, better at everything.
Mixtral 8x7B
MistralBorn
2024-01-08
Died
2025-01-01
Lifespan
359 days
Replaced By
Mistral Small / Mistral Large 2
Cause of Death
Mistral's own newer models matched or exceeded it at lower cost per token.
GPT-4 Turbo
OpenAIBorn
2023-11-06
Died
2025-01-01
Lifespan
422 days
Replaced By
GPT-4o
Cause of Death
GPT-4o was faster and cheaper with equivalent quality. Turbo became redundant.
Jurassic-2
AI21 LabsBorn
2023-03-09
Died
2024-08-01
Lifespan
511 days
Replaced By
Jamba 1.5
Cause of Death
AI21 pivoted from transformer-only to the Jamba SSM-Transformer hybrid architecture.
GPT-3.5 Turbo (0301)
OpenAIBorn
2023-03-01
Died
2024-06-13
Lifespan
470 days
Replaced By
GPT-3.5 Turbo (0125)
Cause of Death
Snapshot deprecation. OpenAI's policy of retiring dated model versions.
GPT-4 (0314)
OpenAIBorn
2023-03-14
Died
2024-06-13
Lifespan
457 days
Replaced By
GPT-4 Turbo
Cause of Death
Replaced by faster, cheaper GPT-4 Turbo with longer context.
Falcon 180B
TII (UAE)Born
2023-09-06
Died
2024-06-01
Lifespan
269 days
Replaced By
Falcon 2
Cause of Death
Outperformed by Llama 2 70B despite being 2.5x larger. Poor efficiency.
Inflection-2.5
Inflection AIBorn
2024-03-07
Died
2024-06-01
Lifespan
86 days
Replaced By
No successor (company pivoted)
Cause of Death
Inflection sold its technology to Microsoft and pivoted to enterprise. Pi chatbot gutted.
Llama 2 (70B)
MetaBorn
2023-07-18
Died
2024-04-18
Lifespan
275 days
Replaced By
Llama 3 70B
Cause of Death
Llama 3 was strictly better. Meta's annual model cycle.
Claude 2.0
AnthropicBorn
2023-07-11
Died
2024-03-04
Lifespan
237 days
Replaced By
Claude 3 Sonnet
Cause of Death
Claude 3 family made the v2 API redundant. All endpoints migrated.
Claude 2.1
AnthropicBorn
2023-11-21
Died
2024-03-04
Lifespan
104 days
Replaced By
Claude 3 Haiku/Sonnet/Opus
Cause of Death
Superseded by the Claude 3 family. 200K context became standard.
Claude Instant 1.2
AnthropicBorn
2023-08-09
Died
2024-03-04
Lifespan
208 days
Replaced By
Claude 3 Haiku
Cause of Death
The 'Instant' tier concept was replaced by Haiku in the Claude 3 naming scheme.
Cohere Command (v1)
CohereBorn
2023-01-15
Died
2024-03-01
Lifespan
411 days
Replaced By
Command R+
Cause of Death
Command R series with RAG-native architecture made v1 obsolete.
PaLM 2
GoogleBorn
2023-05-10
Died
2024-02-08
Lifespan
274 days
Replaced By
Gemini 1.0 Pro
Cause of Death
Rebranded and replaced by Gemini. Google merged DeepMind into the Gemini brand.
Bard
GoogleBorn
2023-03-21
Died
2024-02-08
Lifespan
324 days
Replaced By
Gemini (chatbot)
Cause of Death
Brand kill. Google renamed Bard to Gemini and relaunched. The Bard name died.
GPT-3 (Davinci)
OpenAIBorn
2020-06-11
Died
2024-01-04
Lifespan
1303 days
Replaced By
GPT-3.5 Turbo
Cause of Death
Obsolescence. Too expensive, too slow, outperformed by models 10x cheaper.
GPT-3 (Ada/Babbage/Curie)
OpenAIBorn
2020-06-11
Died
2024-01-04
Lifespan
1303 days
Replaced By
GPT-3.5 Turbo
Cause of Death
Deprecated alongside all legacy GPT-3 completions endpoints.
text-davinci-003
OpenAIBorn
2022-11-28
Died
2024-01-04
Lifespan
402 days
Replaced By
GPT-3.5 Turbo
Cause of Death
Legacy completions API shutdown. The chat paradigm won.
BLOOM 176B
BigScienceBorn
2022-07-06
Died
2023-12-31
Lifespan
543 days
Replaced By
No direct successor
Cause of Death
Academic consortium model that couldn't compete with corporate scale. Funding ended.
Claude 1.0
AnthropicBorn
2023-03-14
Died
2023-11-21
Lifespan
252 days
Replaced By
Claude 2.1
Cause of Death
Rapid iteration. Anthropic moved fast from v1 to v2 to v3.
StableLM Alpha
Stability AIBorn
2023-04-19
Died
2023-11-01
Lifespan
196 days
Replaced By
StableLM Zephyr
Cause of Death
Alpha quality never reached production. Stability AI pivoted to smaller models.
LLaMA 1 (65B)
MetaBorn
2023-02-24
Died
2023-07-18
Lifespan
144 days
Replaced By
Llama 2 70B
Cause of Death
Leaked weights, then officially replaced by Llama 2 with a proper open license.
LaMDA
GoogleBorn
2022-01-20
Died
2023-05-10
Lifespan
475 days
Replaced By
PaLM 2
Cause of Death
Replaced by PaLM 2. Mostly remembered for the 'sentient AI' controversy.
Chinchilla 70B
DeepMindBorn
2022-03-29
Died
2023-05-10
Lifespan
407 days
Replaced By
PaLM 2 / Gemini
Cause of Death
Research model that proved scaling laws. Never commercialized. Absorbed into Gemini work.
Codex
OpenAIBorn
2021-08-10
Died
2023-03-23
Lifespan
590 days
Replaced By
GPT-4
Cause of Death
Absorbed into GPT-4. Code generation became a standard capability, not a separate product.
Gopher 280B
DeepMindBorn
2021-12-08
Died
2022-04-01
Lifespan
114 days
Replaced By
Chinchilla 70B
Cause of Death
Chinchilla showed a smaller model trained on more data beats a bigger model. Gopher became the cautionary tale.
On impermanence
The average lifespan of a major AI model is shrinking. In 2022, models stuck around for a year or more. By 2024, some were deprecated within months of launch. The pace of obsolescence is accelerating.
What strikes me is how quickly "state-of-the-art" becomes "legacy." GPT-4 was the most impressive AI system ever built for about 14 months. Then Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o came along and it became just another model in the dropdown menu.
I maintain this graveyard because I think it's important to remember what came before. The industry moves so fast that models released 18 months ago feel ancient. But they were real engineering achievements, and the people who built them deserve to have that recorded somewhere.
-- dataku