Last week, OpenAI startled the world by announcing that its long-awaited GPT-5 would replace all of its previous models,
The move sparked outrage. Apart from being severely underwhelmed by the performance of OpenAI's newest offering, power users immediately started to beg CEO Sam Altman to bring back preceding models, often for a reason that had little to do with intelligence, artificial or otherwise: they were attached to it on an emotional level.
"Why are we getting rid of the variants and 4o when we all have unique communication styles?" one Reddit user pleaded during an Ask Me Anything with Altman and the GPT-5 team last week.
The sentiment was so overwhelming that Altman caved almost immediately, declaring just over 24 hours after the GPT-5 announcement that the "deprecated" GPT-4o model would be made available once more.
"Ok, we hear you all on 4o; thanks for the time to give us the feedback (and the passion!)" Altman responded.
"We are going to bring it back for Plus users, and will watch usage to determine how long to support it," he added, referring to the company's paid ChatGPT Plus subscription service.
The community was so desperate to get 4o back, though, that Reddit users continued to plead with Altman.
"Would you consider offering GPT-4o for as long as possible rather than just 'we’ll think about how long to offer it for?'" one user wrote.
The incident highlights just how attached — both emotionally and productively — ChatGPT users have become to the service. Numerous users have even gotten sucked into severe mental health crises engendered by the bots that psychiatrists are now dubbing "AI psychosis."
The trend is something Altman appears to be aware of. In a lengthy tweet on Sunday, the billionaire expressed his views on the matter.
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