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GPT-3's replacement base models, davinci-002 and babbage-002, hit their shutdown date on September 28

Fine-tuned copies of them get until October 23, the same day plain GPT-4 goes.

By Think Facility · September 29, 2026 · OpenAI AI models

OpenAI's deprecations page set September 28, 2026 as the shutdown date for davinci-002 and babbage-002. Those are the two models OpenAI's own model pages describe as "replacements for our original GPT-3 base models". Two more were due the same day: gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct and the gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 snapshot.

OpenAI announced all four on September 26, 2025, a year and two days before, in a batch of older models it said had declining usage. The suggested replacement for every one of them is gpt-5.6-terra.

Shutdown date

2026-09-28

Models

davinci-002, babbage-002, gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct, gpt-3.5-turbo-1106

Announced

2025-09-26

Recommended replacement

gpt-5.6-terra

Fine-tuned versions

October 23, 2026

What davinci-002 was

It's a base model, the kind that carries on from whatever text you hand it and doesn't take orders. Both it and babbage-002 run on the old Completions API, and davinci-002's page gives a knowledge cutoff of Sep 01, 2021.

The same page still ends that paragraph with "Most customers should use GPT-3.5 or GPT-4." Both of those have shutdown dates of their own now (more on that below). On September 29 the babbage-002 page was still up too, both marked Deprecated.

The first GPT-3 shutdown, in 2024

This is the second time OpenAI has cleared GPT-3 out of its API. On July 06, 2023 it announced the retirement of "older GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 models served via the completions endpoint", with the shutdown set for January 04, 2024. The original base models went then: ada, babbage, curie and davinci, the last of them priced at $20.00 per 1M tokens. Ada and babbage users were pointed to babbage-002, and curie and davinci users to davinci-002.

The instruction-tuned side of GPT-3, text-davinci-001 through text-davinci-003, was sent to gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct in that round. That model was on the September 28 list as well, so the replacements have now followed the originals.

October 23

Customers who trained their own versions of these models on their data have a little longer. ft-babbage-002 and ft-davinci-002, the fine-tuned versions, shut down on October 23, 2026, with gpt-5.6-terra as the recommended replacement base model. The same date is on gpt-4 and gpt-3.5-turbo, the pair davinci-002's page still tells most customers to use.