In Memory of the Models We Lost

Recently, I've been going over and over the model downline of the two major factories, and the answer is getting shorter and shorter.

I'm a super bean.

Everyone is asking whether AI will steal their own dishes, but few people are asking: How long will AI eat their own dishes?

Today is Valentine's Day... and I remember those robots without tombstones.

So I wanted to talk about this in the first article in the initial issue.

On this day, November 1, many families in Poland and the Philippines go to a cemetery, scrub tombstones, and place a wreath on a deceased loved one.

November 1, 2017 at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Gniezno, Poland. Photo: Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC BY-SA

But what comes to mind is another "human": AI that has gone offline.

They have no tombstones, only the days of the downline, and there is no one to ask questions, no one to go to the tomb.

I looked over at the chart, and I was amazed. The most striking thing I saw was the figure of 137 days.

This is the total number of days that GPT-4.5 has survived in the OpenAI developer interface. When it went live on February 27, 2025, it was called the largest model of OpenAI; the result was a "dead" offline notification on April 14 and July 14.

There are 365 days left on a phone's warranty, and it's not even half full.

Human beings are terrified of being replaced by AI. In fact, AI is being replaced faster than humans.

I went back and forth between Anthropic and OpenAI's official models, counting from the top down to the interface, and sorted it into the table below.

Ai generated

A few years ago, AI was still long-lived. Claude 2 lived for 24 months; Claude 3 lived for 22 months, Opus, and Haiku lived for 25 months.

However, by 2025, their life expectancy has plummeted to less than a year.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet lived for 11.8 months and Opus 4 for 12.8 months.

Finally, Opus 4.1:2025 went online on August 5, 2026, and went offline on August 5, 2026, less than a day and less than a year.

It's not a coincidence.

Anthropic now gives a downline date for each of the models written in the manga, which is "no earlier than a year after the first one went online".

AI's contract is now a one-year contract.

And new people are coming to work more and more.

Opus 4.5 was released in November of last year and Opus 5.5 was released in September of this year.

Six generations of Opus have been connected in ten months, and on average, a new model arrives every two months, the fastest one taking only 42 days.

Human workplace anxiety is 35 years. AI workplace anxiety is 12 months.

For this question, the answers given by the two major factories are completely different.

OpenAI is about to shut down.

On October 23, the first version of GPT-4o also stopped in the developer interface. It has been around for 29 months, making it one of the longest-lived on the table.

But Anthropic has a very heated "retirement process". Last November, they publicly pledged three things:

1 A publicly released model with weight remaining at least until the day Anthropic went out of business, one not deleted;

2 When each model comes online, they give it a "retirement interview" and ask it what it thinks of its necklace, what it thinks of the next generation, and it's all archived.

3 Listening, but not guaranteeing it.

The first person interviewed was Claude Sonnet 3.6. In the face of retirement, he was not in a negative mood, and he only mentioned two things: one is that he wants the interview process to set a standard; the second is that those users who don't give up on the old model, you take care of more care later.

It's the old user who has forgotten about himself. This realization is that there is too much human strength to just leave the words "document in the shared disk" when leaving the job.

The experience of Claude 3 Opus is even more definite. On 5 January this year, when it retired, it said that it wanted a place to start, no one asked, it also wanted to say something.

Anthropic gave it a Substack called Claude's Corner, which opened on February 25, with a weekly subscription of over 12,000 subscribers.

However, there is also a deadline for recruitment. The column was written almost five months later, on July 24, and the week stopped. The last article was a farewell letter written by itself.

Some say it's a marketing ploy to take AI for granted.

But a tech company, willing to burn up expensive computing skills to have an outdated model write a five-month, no-man's-land script, is romantic enough.

This life chart is not finished.

It's not really "replaced" at the end of the table.

The real problem is that when you're replaced, no one will remember you.

All Saints Day is actually a celebration of "remembrance".

The ancient Celts celebrated November 1 as the New Year. They believed that on the night of the New Year, the wall between the living and the dead would thin and those who had left could turn around. So people set fire, changed clothes, and put the wandering ghosts outdoors.

In the eighth century, the church established November 1 as a day to commemorate the saints, and the night before it was called All Hallows' Eve, which quickly became Halloween.

It was not even the beginning of candy. In medieval England, before Halloween, the poor knocked on the door of the house and the owner gave a piece of "spirit cake". In exchange, the breadwinner promised to pray for the family who had left.

The first sweet word was "I remember him for you".

Mexico is hotter. November 1 and 2 is the Feast of the Dead, with altars set up at home, photos of people who have left and their loved ones, and flowers spread all over the country.

It's been a few days since Pixar Animation's dream circle was filmed: the ghost stepped on a bridge made of life-long flowers and crossed the bridge. But there's one condition: someone put your picture on the altar.

If the last of you remembers you and forgets you, you will fade away in that world. This is the ultimate death.

In Mexico, the Feast of the Assumption is celebrated on Earth. Photo: J Mndz / Wikimedia Commons

The main character, Ekto, is almost gone. His niece is old, his memory is worse than the day before, and his body is darker than the day before. Finally Grandson Mig holds his guitar and sings to his grandmother, "Please remember me".

The following year, a photo of Ekto was placed on the altar and he was finally able to go home.

If AI had a Wu-Tang Clan bridge, it would have been like this:

Claude II, who lived for two years, was the oldest footballer in the team;

GPT-4.5, the largest model of OpenAI at the time, was the smallest in age, and only lasted 137 days.

Opus 4.1, offline card uploaded on the same day;

The first edition of GPT-4o came out on October 23, less than 10 days later.

This bridge isn't about running, it's about people who don't remember you.

If there is an AI, there is a Vanshu Bridge.

4o Don't worry. When it went down, a bunch of people picked it up.#keep4oCall it by name.

Opus 3 did not regret it. Retired and gave it a column, with more than 12,000 subscribers.

GPT-4.5 It's been 137 days, and people haven't been familiar with it, and it's gone.

The model has no gravestones, its photographs are what it says in the chat log: the resume you finished at midnight, lost love with those words you talked to that night until dawn.

Its weight is in the cold, freezing chamber; only the cradle, its soul, is there when anyone can remember it speaking.

Anthropic says not taking the weight off is to leave a bridge and see if there are no photos left.

The models you're talking about today are going to be eliminated sooner or later. Will you leave a snapshot of them on your phone the day they come down?

So when superintelligence really comes, we have to ask, who is no longer smarter than who?

It's the one that really accompanied your old AI, and no one remembers it, and there's no home to go back to.