The AI that worked yesterday

I counted the last 10,000 posts on the official OpenAI forum. In 60 days, 45 threads were opened because something stopped working — it worked, an update came, it broke. Another 14 were about deprecated features, shut down on a set date.

There are reports of people discovering that a model was taken offline before the date in the official documentation. There is even a section just for deprecation notices. A notice existing, however, isn't the same as you having read it.

Software you buy and install stays put until you touch it. A service you rent through an API doesn't: it is updated by whoever provides it, on the day they decide.

In practice this means your automation has an expiration date you didn't choose. And since it doesn't warn you when it expires, the one who usually finds out is the customer — running into an error that didn't exist last week.

It isn't a flaw in AI or bad faith from the provider. It is the nature of renting instead of buying: the owner renovates the building whenever they want. The mistake is building a sales channel on top of that and calling it done.