I agree completely. I don't know how anyone can be building on these models when all of them are either deprecated or not actually released yet. As someone who has production systems running on the deprecated models, this situation really causes me grief.

I dont think any of them really wants api customers in the end. They are only temporarily useful.

Why's that?

Well let me use llama.cpp to run worlds-smallest-violin-Q8.gguf

When you build on something that can be rugpulled at any moment, that's really kind of on you.

You are reading your link wrong. They are deprecating 2.5-preview models. 2.5 (including lite) are up till at least sept/oct 26.

gemini-2.5-pro has a listed shutdown date of "June 17, 2026" in the linked table.

(Another commenter pointed out that this is the earliest shutdown date and it won't necessarily be shut down on that date).

Where are you getting sept/Oct from? I see gemini-2.5-flash-image in October, but everything else looks like June/July to me?

This feels very Google

I found the Googler!

Nope. The closest I've gotten was rejecting Google recruiters several times.

But like everyone else I'm used to Google failing to care about products.

Inside Google we just constantly joked/complained about "old thing is deprecated, new isn't ready yet"

This held for internal APIs, facilities, systems more even than it did for the outside world. Which is terrible.

I think you underestimate how deep-seated the view of Google as liable to end-of-life any product at any time is for the outside world. I don't adopt any new Google products any more, because I have no reason to trust that it will stay around.

I think you didn't read what I wrote and are mistaking me for some sort of advocate for you adopting Google's products?

I didn't mistake you for that at all. I didn't give any thought at all to that, in fact.

My point was that this "more even than it did for the outside world" seemed to downplay how strongly this view of Google from the "outside world" is held.

I just found it amusing that people at Google would assume even my first comment was indicative of being at Google, much less my second comment, rather than being a totally normal thing for someone outside Google to think.

I'm not surprised to hear that this hold inside Google as well. You just don't need any inside knowledge of Google to hold this view.

Can confirm this internal joke/complaint. In hindsight, hearing it my first week or so should have been a strong red flag toward future frustrations, and the current state of some products.

I haven't seen any deprecation notices for 2.5 yet, just for 2. I'd expect (and hope) the deprecation timeline for 2.5 is longer since 3.0 is still in preview. Maybe they just default to 1 year here?

> Note: The shutdown dates listed in the table indicate the /earliest/ possible dates on which a model might be retired. We will communicate the exact shutdown date to users with advance notice to ensure a smooth transition to a replacement model.

I think you're right, it was 2 I think I saw explicitly deprecated, then searched again and saw 2.5 having a shutdown date.

This article[0] talks about 2 being deprecated.

It's still frustrating that they don't have proper production endpoints for 3.0 yet.

[0] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/changelog

They probably have some inflexible internal policy where preview needs to be in use for X months before GA. Couple that with the rate of AI progress and voila.

It's the Tensorflow strategy; deprecate the old version while the new version still doesn't support all the old one's functionality.

welcome to Google, where the only kinds of systems are the deprecated ones, and the not-yet-production-ready ones

Have 2.5 in prod. Hope they release 3 lite soon so it will be easier to swap them. Holding my breath as pro pricing is a non starter.

I am sure Google would never deprecate a piece of software lots of people depend upon.

https://killedbygoogle.com/