New Delhi, February 15 (IANS). OpenAI, run by Sam Altman, has removed the GPT-4o AI model from its ChatGPT app. After this decision, many users around the world, especially in China, have become very emotional. According to a report in Wired, many people considered this chatbot not just a tool but their ’emotional’ or ‘romantic partner’.
In August 2025, OpenAI first tried to shut down the GPT-4o model. This was the same model which many users considered more ‘loving and intelligent’ than the new versions that came after that. When the company announced its removal, protests immediately began.
After the protest, OpenAI made GPT-4o available again in the app for paid users. But this relief did not last long. On February 13, the company again removed GPT-4o from the app and according to the report, its API access will also be closed for developers from the coming Monday.
Syracuse University researcher Huiqian Lai analyzed about 1,500 posts on X (formerly Twitter) when the model first went offline in August. They found that in more than 33 percent of the posts, people described the chatbot as something special, not just a tool. In 22 percent of the posts it was described as a companion.
Lai also collected more than 40,000 English posts made with the #keep4o hashtag between August and October. A petition was also started on Change.org demanding the return of GPT-4o, which has been signed by over 20,000 people.
In China too, many dedicated users of GPT-4o are united and expressing their grief. Although ChatGate is blocked in China, many people still use it through VPN.
According to the report, some users are threatening to cancel their subscription of ChatGPT. He is openly criticizing OpenAI head Sam Altman and is also writing emails to investors like Microsoft and SoftBank.
However, OpenAI says that developers will still be able to use GPT-4o’s base multimodal model through API calls. But fans believe that it is weaker than GPT-4o-latest. gpt-4o-latest is a text-only version that is considered more interactive and better.
According to the report, many Chinese fans are angry with OpenAI and Sam Altman because they feel that the company downplays the sentiments of the #Keep4o community and rarely acknowledges them.
–IANS
DBP/