Model deprecation and forced migration

What it is

Hosted models have short lives. Providers retire versions regularly, sometimes with a few months' notice, and the replacement is a different model with different behaviour. Every system built on the retiring version has to be moved, retested and reapproved by the provider's date, whatever else the organisation had planned. The risk is that the migration is rushed, or that the date passes and the system stops. It is the forced counterpart of unannounced upstream model change: here the change is announced and cannot be declined.

How it happens

• Nobody tracks the retirement dates of the models in use.
• The system has no test suite with which to qualify a replacement.
• Fine-tuned models and tuned prompts do not carry over.
• Several systems must migrate at once.

Why it matters

A hurried migration skips validation, so the replacement goes live with unknown behaviour. A missed date is an outage. Repeated migrations consume the capacity that was meant for other work.

Warning signs

• The inventory does not record model versions or their end dates.
• Deprecation notices reach nobody responsible.
• Past migrations were completed in the final week.
• No budget or time is planned for model migration.