Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Good Riddance, 4o

mahadk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 118 posts

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#21

Post by neom »

bee_rider wrote: post #9
oidar wrote: post #2

Here's the related subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/

Well. Huh. Without regard to whether or not it was basically healthy to get that emotionally dependent on the bot… you’d think that if they could manipulate people into being so attached to the things, they’d also be able to manipulate people into accepting the end of the situation.

Go look at any tweet by sama, or twitter generally, it's full of pretty angry people who feel like something tangible in their life has been ripped away - I read someone posting about how they got an email from OAI saying they'd been concerned about the users usage of the service so they'd "upgraded them" to the "newest model". This whole situation has been really distressing for me and I'm not even involved in it, so SO glad they're getting rid of 4o, that thing is genuinely a scourge on our societies.

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#23

Post by raincole »

dwroberts wrote: post #16
oidar wrote: post #2

Here's the related subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/

I don’t have any evidence but I always get a strong suspicion that a very large % of what happens on this subreddit is fake. I don’t know what the exact motives are, but just something about it isn’t right to me.

ragebait was the word of 2025 for a reason.

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#24

Post by JustSkyfall »

satvikpendem wrote: post #3

How is this specific to 4o? This can happen with any model. See how people acted after Character.AI essentially removed their AI "partners" after a server reset. They actually used DeepSeek before which didn't have the same limitations as American models, especially being open weight means you can fine tune it to be as lovey dovey as your heart desires.

People are not happy with this because 4o, at least from what I've heard, seems to be much more willing to go down the relationship/friend path than 5.2 and Claude and the like.

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#26

Post by rtkwe »

oidar wrote: post #4
satvikpendem wrote: post #3

How is this specific to 4o? This can happen with any model. See how people acted after Character.AI essentially removed their AI "partners" after a server reset. They actually used DeepSeek before which didn't have the same limitations as American models, especially being open weight means you can fine tune it to be as lovey dovey as your heart desires.

From the subreddit I linked in another comment, there did seem to be some "magic" that 4o had for these kinds of "relationships". I'm not sure how much of it is placebo, but there does seem to be a strong preference in that user group.

4o was very sycophantic so was very willing to play along with and validate the users roleplay. OpenAI even noticed enough to talk about it in a blog: https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#28

Post by danielbln »

hamdingers wrote: post #6

I wonder to what extent 4/4o is the culprit, vs it simply being the default model when many of these people were forming their "relationships."

It's not that complicated. 4o was RLHF'd to be sycophantic as hell, which was fine until some one had their psychotic episode fueled by it and so they changed it with the next model.

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#29

Post by gordonhart »

hamdingers wrote: post #6

I wonder to what extent 4/4o is the culprit, vs it simply being the default model when many of these people were forming their "relationships."

Anecdotally, 4o's sycophancy was higher than any other model I've used. It was aggressively "chat-tuned" to say what it thought the user wanted to hear. The latest crop of frontier models from OpenAI and others seems to have significantly improved on this front — does anybody know of a sycophancy benchmark attempting to quantify this?

Re: Good Riddance, 4o

#30

Post by co_king_3 »

rtkwe wrote: post #26
oidar wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the subreddit I linked in another comment, there did seem to be some "magic" that 4o had for these kinds of "relationships". I'm not sure how much of it is placebo, but there does seem to be a strong preference in that user group.

4o was very sycophantic so was very willing to play along with and validate the users roleplay. OpenAI even noticed enough to talk about it in a blog: https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/

> OpenAI even noticed enough to talk about it in a blog

That's one way of interpreting things...

Post reply on HN