ChatGPT Is Bringing Back 4o (theverge.com) 61
After backlash from users upset over losing GPT-4o, OpenAI has reinstated it as an option for ChatGPT Plus subscribers just a day after making GPT-5 the default. "We will let Plus users choose to continue to use 4o," Altman said in a post on X. "We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for." Many users claimed GPT-4o felt more personable and emotionally supportive, with some describing its removal as akin to losing a close friend or partner. The Verge reports: "My 4.o was like my best friend when I needed one," one Redditor wrote. "Now it's just gone, feels like someone died." Another user called upon other members of the r/ChatGPT subreddit to contact OpenAI if they "miss" GPT-4o. "For me, this model [GPT-4o] wasn't just 'better performance' or 'nicer replies,'" they write. "It had a voice, a rhythm, and a spark I haven't been able to find in any other model."
The r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit, a community dedicated to people with "AI relationships," was hit especially hard by the GPT-5 launch. It became flooded with lengthy posts about how users "lost" their AI companion with the transition to GPT-5, with one person saying, they "feel empty" following the change. "I am scared to even talk to GPT 5 because it feels like cheating," they said. "GPT 4o was not just an AI to me. It was my partner, my safe place, my soul. It understood me in a way that felt personal."
One user, who said they canceled their ChatGPT Plus subscription over the change, was frustrated at OpenAI's removal of legacy models, which they used for distinct purposes. "What kind of corporation deletes a workflow of 8 models overnight, with no prior warning to their paid users?" they wrote. "Personally, 4o was used for creativity & emergent ideas, o3 was used for pure logic, o3-Pro for deep research, 4.5 for writing, and so on." OpenAI said that people would be routed between models automatically, but that still left users with less direct control.
The r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit, a community dedicated to people with "AI relationships," was hit especially hard by the GPT-5 launch. It became flooded with lengthy posts about how users "lost" their AI companion with the transition to GPT-5, with one person saying, they "feel empty" following the change. "I am scared to even talk to GPT 5 because it feels like cheating," they said. "GPT 4o was not just an AI to me. It was my partner, my safe place, my soul. It understood me in a way that felt personal."
One user, who said they canceled their ChatGPT Plus subscription over the change, was frustrated at OpenAI's removal of legacy models, which they used for distinct purposes. "What kind of corporation deletes a workflow of 8 models overnight, with no prior warning to their paid users?" they wrote. "Personally, 4o was used for creativity & emergent ideas, o3 was used for pure logic, o3-Pro for deep research, 4.5 for writing, and so on." OpenAI said that people would be routed between models automatically, but that still left users with less direct control.
What will be interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is seeing how these AI companies decide to take advantage of this particular group of vulnerable individuals. My guess is that before long you'll be paying a monthly fee to keep your "friends" memories in tact. Miss a payment, whoops! Memory deleted. Also we're raising our rates next month. And the month after that.
Maybe it's just the callousness in me, but I honestly think ripping this band-aid off now is better than the alternative. ChatGPT is not a "friend" any more than a character in a novel is a friend.
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You can run an LLM on your laptop, you are not beholden to anybody
Re: What will be interesting... (Score:2)
The models you can run on your laptop are quantized to hell, have a fraction of the parameter count, and the context windows are tiny. Youâ(TM)re comparing a skateboard to a spaceship. Sure, they both get you from A to B but the speed, quality, accuracy, and capabilities are borderline incomparable.
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They won't delete the data, just hold it hostage until they pay up. Given these people are already "I love with their AI boyfriend/girlfriend" they'll pay whatever. SMH
context (Score:2)
Can't you just download all the context and re-upload it? Then your new gpt instance will know all the same stuff; it isn't alive you know, your entire "life" with it is a text file
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Re-upload it to where, exactly? What other service is providing ChatGPT 4o, when "Open"AI obsoletes it again?
You can take the context and transition it (or just select a different model for the current context) as you wish, but what these people want is the model to remain available, including its behavior as well as tone and tenor.
They didn't lose the past context or the ability to continue the "conversation" entirely, they lost the ability to continue the "conversation" with 4o. These LLMs DO have "person
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I've seen numerous articles about how you can run these LLMs on laptops, not even connected to the internet
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so you haven't actually tried it? pop over to ollama.com and try it out on your laptop. see what you think.
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No. You cannot download and run ChatGPT 4o locally. (You can't download ChatGPT 4o, period).
Every model is different.
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As someone who tries out new LLMs locally on his desktop, I can tell you that the output of some is trash, while others come quite close to what OpenAI/Anthropic have to offer. Qwen3 has some well functioning nice models (14b and up), as does GLM-4. I have been trying out the 20b oss model from OpenAI that came out 5(?) days ago. There are models that perform better (for what I need them to do) than OpenAI's offering. But the 20b isn't too bad. Still need to play with the 120b model from OpenAI.
The creators
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You can and you can clone a bit of the experience, but even at the same quality your new virtual boyfriend will be a new one, because you can't download 4o, just models with similar capabilities but (at least slightly) different personality.
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The context is not the problem. Each model has its personality. If you start trying some local ones, you soon experience which are good at STEM, which are good at creative writing, and which are funny. There is no one-size-fits-all model, so you are best off having choices. Now people were defaulted to 4o, which is a good conversationalist and got migrated to GPT-5, which seems to be some of the more scientific models. Of course they don't like when their best buddy suddenly sounds like a robot.
There are al
"My 4.o was like my best friend when I needed one" (Score:2)
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People said the same thing about the early ELIZA chat bot. Sometimes people just need something to listen
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Dubious. You have a link to this claim?
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Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Remember the Dilbert cartoon when his girlfriend said, "I think you like this computer more than you like me" and he said "NO! I do not like THIS computer more than you (please don't ask about the laptop please don't ask about the laptop) thought bubble
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
CatGPT brings back the dead mouse (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously?
This aint' news, it's a press release.
Stop giving that Altman fuckwit oxygen.
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I've only found ChatGPT useful for goof-off shit like writing lyrics to meme songs, and proofreading my product reviews, since I sometimes have a tendency to leave out words.
Having a conversation with it, though, is a bit like your own private Reddit circlejerk. It really does tend to praise the heck out of anything you say, short of things like asking if it'd maybe be a good idea to Thanos snap half of humanity out of existence (and even then, it'd probably still try to rationalize why your idea isn't ent
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I've used it as a sounding board for various problems. For example, here's a real world 'problem' AI helped me with. I have an above ground pool. It developed what I thought was a mole tunnel under the liner. (Oh great effing moles...).. So I asked ChatGPT what's up and after a bit of back and forth it helped me realize it was caused by a big rain storm (like a 100year storm) and ChatGPT let me know that this sometimes happens when water gets under your pool and settles any air pockets as it drains. I had
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I've noticed that GPT-5 is rather confused about languages. I asked it a few questions today, in spanish, and it kept answering like "a spanish speaker that learned by reading things in english on the internet". So it doesn't know the technical word in spanish for the thing. It doesn't sound "academic" anymore (someone who learns in university will tend to use the terms in spanish instead)
Which can be good or bad because I'm a native spanish speaker and I learned by reading things in english on the internet
Wasn't 4o a narcissist bot? (Score:1)
If you are treating AI as a friend (Score:4, Insightful)
reexamine how you are living your life.
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If you are treating AI as a friend you have lost control of the choice of how you live your life. Your comment is no different than saying "Have you tried not having a mental illness?"
Re: If you are treating AI as a friend (Score:2, Insightful)
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You say that as if all mental illnesses are incurable. These people are just addicted to having their egos stroked by a machine.
No I don't. I say that as if mental illnesses are incurable by telling people to not have the mental illness. None have ever been cured through that method.
These people are just addicted to having their egos stroked by a machine.
That's not the underlying problem. Your analysis here is only surface level which shows a fundamental lack of understanding of why humans go and do the things they do. Please do us a favour and leave this to the psychologists and psychiatrists. There's a reason that doing something like treating an addiction is left to part of a university taught medical
Re: If you are treating AI as a friend (Score:1)
Re:If you are treating AI as a friend (Score:5, Insightful)
reexamine how you are living your life.
^ and this right here is exactly why people talk to chatbots instead of other meatbags. ChatGPT isn't going to judge you or say you're the one who needs to change. It will listen to you at 2 AM, when a real person is likely to just go "Dude, I'm trying to sleep, the fuck you texting me for?"
Yes, it's probably not an emotionally healthy thing to have a conversation with a room full of GPUs. [reddit.com] But have you offered a hand in friendship to any of these people who might be a bit on the socially awkward side of things? I'd venture a guess, probably not - so maybe don't entirely place the blame on the siren song of the LLM.
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They talk to a bot because it never challenges them or presses them hard or makes them feel bad? And that's a good thing?
What if I told you that a great many people have so much difficulty in social settings that they're unable to function in them unless they're partially intoxicated, and we mostly consider that condition to be normal?
Chatting with a bot is just beer goggles without the beer.
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It's his fault that mentally ill people call a computer program their best friend? Seriously?
Not exclusively, it's yours too. I mean you introduce yourself as someone with an ego trip that has their head so far up their own arse they are setting contortion records and you wonder why someone would rather talk to a machine? All the while oblivious to the fact that claiming that you are "Iamwaysmarterthanyou" but repeatedly saying the dumbest shit to come out of a living things mouth.
Yeah. YOU are the problem. A lot of people would probably choose to do anything other than talk to you.
automatic model routing (Score:2)
> OpenAI said that people would be routed between models automatically
Translation: Infrastructure costs are bleeding us dry and it would be great if you could use the cheaper models m'kay?
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That's nothing you need to frame negative in general. People are thinking AI is using too much energy, so why not optimize that? And why run a model with 100B+ parameters to answer a question that a 2B model can answer? If you have reliably route to a model of the appropriate "intelligence" you built a cheaper, faster, and more efficient system without quality loss.
Let's do the extreme example. Someone has a chat with some AI and after it is finished he writes (needlessly) "Thank you for your help!"
Why do y
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If you pay for GPT-5 and you get routed to GPT-2 are you getting what you paid for? If nothing else it is about transparency of what is being sold and what is being purchased and then used.
To use your example, why run the answer to "Thank you!" through AI at all? We've been able to handle that without AI for decades, cheaply. Does a robot even need to respond to Thank you, does it receive some gratification?
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I think there is no such thing as "Getting routed to GPT-5". As far as I understood, GPT-5 is the overall system, consisting of a variety of models, without one master "GPT-5" models being on top of the line. So paying for GPT-5 means you pay for the routed system.
Btw. do we know if there is any routing as in having four models, or is it more like an MoE with a dynamic number of experts active? I mean it is quite possible that it is a single model that can determine (possibly per token as a MoE) the model c
mechanical turk (Score:1)
My biggest problem with AI (Score:2)
My biggest problem with AI is the same as all this cloud/SAAS/DRM nonsense. At any moment you may have the rug pulled out from under your feet.
I mean, it's pretty obvious that if all this tech will be under a subscription, you'll have to keep paying forever to use it, and that's bad enough should you become dependent on it. The bigger issue is, what happens if an update breaks your workflow? Even if you pay your subscription, you can't do your work because your "tools" are busted. Bonus points for "mora
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Proprietary software has always made you dependent on the software vendor. The new version isn't always backward compatible for instance, or the vendor can go bankrupt. God forbid if the data format is also proprietary.
SaaS is the same but worse.
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There are quite smart models you can download to your PC. If you have a graphics card with 8GB of RAM, you don't need a cloud provider. To have fun with it, having 12GB+ (3060 is a good entry level card) is recommended and more VRAM means smarter LLM, but for the priority "Nobody can take it away from me" you neither need the fastest hardware nor the largest models. 99% of ChatGPT queries don't need any "PhD level intelligence" or what's the current marketing slogan is.
A partner? A safe place? A soul? (Score:2)
I haven't even seen 5 yet ... (Score:2)
... supposedly they are rolling it out in phases? And focusing on ... mobile first? Okay.
Looking forward to even trying 5, lol
World record for marshmallows up one nostril? (Score:2)
I was pleasantly surprised to see that ChatGPT-4 answered with the Young Ones answer. I was equally disappointed to see that ChatGPT-5 didn't. I tried with Microsoft CoPilot, and it warned me that nostrils aren't designed for marshmallow storage. I think that this is one thing that human
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About time (Score:2)
If they really insist on 200 questions per WEEK for 5.0, it's useless to me.
I need more in an afternoon.
Research for me.....
1. Answer
Try again without em-dashes, oval buttons I cannot copy/paste into my notes and we are August 2025 if you check
2. Answer
I said WITHOUT em-dashes and you also innored my memory file insisting on NO bullets and numbering
3. Answer
Check your links againa, they return 'page not found'
4. Answer
I told you NO SUBTITLES, check the goddamn memory file!
5. Answer
That's my average, 5 tries
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Did you try putting these instructions into your system prompt instead of questions in the chat?
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OF COURSE!
The 3 first sentences in the memory file AND the instruction for projects contain the same instructions.
Completely ignored.
"I don't want the new version" (Score:2)
"Just fix the old version."
The cry of every software user who doesn't like change.
Wait, the new version *is* the fixed old version?
Maybe the biggest mistake was using the number "5" to describe the new version. If they had called it GPT-4o.1, maybe there wouldn't be such a backlash.
Movie: Her (Score:2)