[kamranjon]

Sure, but Google also leaves little to no overlap between models and often will leave models in preview mode (which many companies cannot use in production for legal reasons) - right up until the point that the previous model is deprecated.

The point is that if you want to build a platform that customers can rely on based on their own schedules of feature development, you need to support models for longer periods of time. For example, OpenAI is still offering older models like gpt4 which was released in 2023 - this gives customers plenty of time to test, experiment and eventually migrate to a newer model if it makes sense.