I get the feeling they frequently deploy hot patches for edge cases. I hate to call them edge cases because they are actually “real cases” - things like adjusting system prompts so one day it might happy answer “Fill in the blank: F _ _ _ you”.

To truly freeze a model, you would need to freeze its weights, freeze its system prompts (no one sees those), and avoid any and all action that might impact its output. Perhaps would even need the default temperature to be 0 so it’s truly a deterministic API, with the option to add in some temperature to the responses.

Until then, I consider those “versions” but only reference the model weights and not the abstractions around the model