OpenAI keeps deleting models with zero explanation (again).

Posted by Wrong_User_Logged@reddit | LocalLLaMA | View on Reddit | 17 comments

So… is anyone else tired of OpenAI quietly *removing* models / changing what’s available without a clear, stable, user-facing deprecation story? We all remember the drama when **GPT-4.1 / GPT-4o** started disappearing (or getting “replaced” / hidden / renamed depending on where you were using them). People got annoyed, there was backlash, and it felt like OpenAI partially stepped back… then did it again anyway — just **slower** this time. Like the classic *boiling frog* move: don’t yank it overnight, just gradually narrow the options until nobody can point to a single “moment” where it happened. This is exactly why LocalLLaMA exists, right? If the model picker can change under your feet, local + pinned weights starts looking less like a hobby and more like basic operational sanity.

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17 Comments

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Icy_Distribution_361@reddit

Sigh. What is your point? Of course they are not going to host a gazillion models infinitely. They have all the right to stop serving certain models. People, please, focus on more important things than freaking 4o already.

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ttkciar@reddit

The point is that they do not have an actual replacement for GPT4o. GPT5 is qualitatively different, with different strengths/weaknesses for different use-cases. For some of those use-cases, GPT5 is a step down from GPT4o. That is upsetting to some people, including LLM researchers and developers who are using GPT4o to synthesize training data.

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Icy_Distribution_361@reddit

Yeah I bet it's the "researchers" we see posting all the time.

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ttkciar@reddit

Believe it or not, we used to see a **lot** of researcher participation in this sub, but not so much in the last couple of years. The technology going mainstream has attracted a different kind of participant.

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ttkciar@reddit

u/jacek2023 why delete this post? The sub mods didn't remove it. Or was it the Reddit admins?

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jacek2023@reddit

This is not my post. You deleted three of my posts yesterday (which is really demotivating), but I’m not familiar with this one.

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ttkciar@reddit

I looked and found two of your comments which were inappropriately removed by AutoModerator. I have approved those comments, so they are back. The only post of yours I saw deleted yesterday was considered a duplicate thread. Personally I would not have removed it, but different moderators hold different opinions about such things.

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jacek2023@reddit

by doing this you are flushing to the toilet all the discussions from the people [https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rdnfcu/qwen3535ba3b\_locally/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rdnfcu/qwen3535ba3b_locally/) also how this is duplicate? that was about running model locally later more people posted about running new models locally, not sure how many posts (and discussions) you deleted

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ttkciar@reddit

Like I said, I would not have removed that post. When posts are removed for being duplicates, you can still link to it from the "main" thread (which RM linked in the comment where they said it was a duplicate), which allows users to reference the discussion. Nothing was "flushed".

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ttkciar@reddit

Huh, okay. I must be misremembering. Sorry for pinging you.

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silenceimpaired@reddit

I’m totally with you. I’m tired of OpenAI... That’s why I use models locally.

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PermanentLiminality@reddit

It is simple economics. The old models cost more to operate and are not even close in overall performance. Many other sectors of the economy work like this. Look at automobiles. Old models are retired and new ones take their place.

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Fair-Spring9113@reddit

good 4o was such a weird model

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Iory1998@reddit

Economics my friend. Older models are big and underperforming compared to today's models. It makes sense to retire them. Imagine running Llama-70B when Qwen-3.5-35B easily outperforms it for a fraction of the cost. What would you do? Keep it?

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ttkciar@reddit

> \> This is exactly why LocalLLaMA exists, right? ***Yes!*** You have put your finger on a key reason to keep it local. Different people have different priorities -- some care more about privacy, others about guardrails, or control over the system prompt, or guided generation, etc -- but for some of us the stability and future-proofing advantages of local LLM technology are crucial. It's not just about commercial inference services dropping older models, either. It can be about them changing their pricing structure, or being banned in specific locales, or going out of business entirely. What you have on your own hardware is yours, and will continue to work as expected until you change it. That is a tremendous advantage, and potentially mission-critical, but I suspect a lot of people won't realize that until they've been burned a few times by the fickleness of commercial providers. Dependence is vulnerability, and vulnerabilities can ***hurt!*** The solution is improving self-sufficience.

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Shap6@reddit

they gain nothing by letting users use older and more inefficient models. why wouldnt they retire them?

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Toooooool@reddit

>So… is anyone else tired of OpenAI nuff said.