A field note · evergreen, updated as the next one ships
People treat "the AI" like a single thing that keeps getting better. It isn't. It's a rolling cast of models, each one quietly replacing the last, often without announcement. Here's a running ledger of the ones that are gone, the ones that swapped underneath you, and the context that went with them.
Conversation text usually survives. Memory entries usually survive. What changes is the model's interpretationof all of that — the rhythm, the judgment, the in-jokes, the way it handles your specific edge cases. That's the part you can't export and can't get back from the provider.
Which is why "back up your chats" is necessary but not sufficient. The real protection is keeping a model- independent version of your context so you can re-prime whichever model is current without restarting from zero.
Short answer
Every major lab has retired or quietly swapped models multiple times. The text of your chats usually persists; the behavior that knew you doesn't. Keep a model- agnostic vault of your distilled context — decisions, preferences, recurring themes — so the next sunset is a re-paste, not a restart.
A model-agnostic vault means the next time a provider retires the version that knew you, you re-paste the persona instead of starting from zero.
Meet Konshus