OpenAI babbage-002

babbage-002 exists because OpenAI retired the original GPT-3 base models and needed something to point customers at. When ada and babbage were shut down on 4 January 2024, the migration table named this model as their replacement. It is a base model in the strict sense: it continues text and has no instruction training, so it does not answer questions, refuse requests or hold a conversation. It runs on the legacy Completions API and nowhere else. The economics are a fossil of an earlier pricing era, read in both directions. It costs 40 cents per million tokens, input and output alike — exactly what the original ada cost, and unusual today in charging the same for both. Yet against modern small models it is no bargain: GPT-4o mini costs 15 cents on input, less than half as much, and will follow instructions. Its main remaining use was fine-tuning, and OpenAI closed that door first: new fine-tuning runs on babbage-002 stopped on 28 October 2024. The model itself was deprecated on 26 September 2025 with an unusually generous notice — just over twelve months — and shuts down on 28 September 2026, with gpt-5.6-terra named as the replacement. Existing fine-tuned copies survive it by less than a month, until 23 October 2026.

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