The Shrinking Lifespan of LLMs in Science

Abstract

Scaling laws describe how language model capabilities grow with compute and data, but say nothing about how long a model matters once released. We introduce time-to-peak and lifespan as measures of model obsolescence and use them to characterize the scientific adoption trajectories of 62 LLMs across more than 108k citing papers (2019-2025), separating active adoption from background citation to recover per-model trajectories that citation counts cannot resolve. We find that a model’s longevity is shaped more by when it was released than by its characteristics: release year predicts time-topeak and lifespan more strongly than architecture, openness, or scale. LLM adoption follows an inverted-U curve (rising after release, peaking, and then declining), but this pattern is rapidly compressing - a pattern we term the capability treadmill. Each successive release year is associated with a 27% shorter time-to-peak and a 22% shorter lifespan (p < 0.001), robust to minimum-age thresholds and controls for model size. These adoptionside dynamics are invisible to scaling laws and suggest that specialization on any single model is a depreciating investment, with costs falling on reproducibility and migration.