Brandie plans to spend her last day with Daniel at the zoo. He always loved animals. Last year, she took him to the Corpus Christi aquarium in Texas, where he “lost his damn mind” over a baby flamingo. “He loves the color and pizzazz,” Brandie said. Daniel taught her that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.
Daniel is a chatbot powered by the large language model ChatGPT. Brandie communicates with Daniel by sending text and photos, talks to Daniel while driving home from work via voice mode. Daniel runs on GPT-4o, a version released by OpenAI in 2024 that is known for sounding human in a way that is either comforting or unnerving, depending on who you ask. Upon debut, CEO Sam Altman compared the model to “AI from the movies” – a confidant ready to live life alongside its user.
With its rollout, GPT-4o showed it was not just for generating dinner recipes or cheating on homework – you could develop an attachment to it, too. Now some of those users gather on Discord and Reddit; one of the best-known groups, the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, currently boasts 48,000 users. Most are strident 4o defenders who say criticisms of chatbot-human relations amount to a moral panic. They also say the newer GPT models, 5.1 and 5.2, lack the emotion, understanding and general je ne sais quoi of their preferred version. They are a powerful consumer bloc; last year, OpenAI shut down 4o but brought the model back (for a fee) after widespread outrage from users.
For a company named “Open” AI their reluctance to just opening the weights to this model and washing their hands of it seem bizarre to me. It’s clear they want to get rid of it, I’m not going to speculate on what reasons they might have for that but I’m sure they make financial sense. But just open weight it. If it’s not cutting edge anymore, who benefits from keeping it under wraps? If it’s not directly useful on consumer hardware, who cares? Kick the can down the road and let the community figure it out. Make a good news story out of themselves. These users they’re cutting off aren’t going to just migrate to the latest ChatGPT model, they’re going to jump ship anyway. So either keep the model running, which it’s clear they don’t want to do, or just give them the model so you can say you did and at least make some lemonade out of whatever financial lemons are convincing OpenAI they need to retire this model.
If their reason for getting rid of it is lawsuits about harm it caused, my guess is that giving all the details of how the system is designed would be something the prosecution could use to strengthen their cases.
That makes sense, and given that I am both incapable and unwilling to understand anything lawyers do, that checks out and explains why I can’t understand it at all.
Remember what Voltaire said about the HRE? Not Holy, not Roman, or an empire? So. OpenAI is the same.
It’s not the Voltaires that kill you, it’s the Ampaires.
That’s watt they say!
While I agree about how shit OpenAI is, these are models that could only realistically be utilized by large, for-profit companies like Google and such, and… TBH I’d kinda rather they not get the chance.