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Comment by RaSoJo | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly what I find frustrating. I get comfortable with the latest model X. Then a new sparkly model Y launches. I am like, I don't need your new fangled Y, that consumes more tokens. My needs are small and i am happy with the older X.

But then X starts to degrade. At first subtly, and then drastically. So then I am forced to upgrade to Y.

What I do not understand is:

> is this a sneaky way for companies to push users up the chain?

> Or is this a genuine fault in model design/resource allocation?

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I suppose it is both. Basically all frontier models are inference-time compute bound thanks to reasoning. And actual reasoning traces are locked behind closed doors at all American labs. So whenever they want to push a new model and need to give it hardware, it would make sense to cut into the reasoning budgets of older models. Users will not be able to see that directly, it will only become apparent on high-end, difficult tasks - exactly the kind of tasks where the provider wants you to use the new model anyway, so they can further improve it.

The economics of AI fall apart if you stay with the old model forever. No need to buy new GPUs or build new data centers.

So the latest in planned obsolescence are LLM models.

Can you think of many examples of a SaaS provider who regularly keeps old versions of a product around for customers to use?

A far more common scenario is that new versions are rolled out to everyone, without offering a choice, as soon as they're considered stable.

Older versions consume resources and require staff to spend time on operating and supporting them. Those resources could be used to run a newer version.

The tl;dr is the simple economics of any SaaS product.

If you want to be able to run old versions indefinitely and control the resources assigned to it, you need to self-host (an open model).

> Can you think of many examples of a SaaS provider who regularly keeps old versions of a product around for customers to use?

Sure. Blender and Ubuntu offer long-lived old versions of their software that get regular fixes.

Neither Blender nor Ubuntu are SaaS. You're just confirming my point: if you want to run old versions of software, you need to host it yourself.

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