The florist on the corner had Valentine’s roses in a bucket by the door. Twelve bucks a stem. The petals were already starting to curl at the edges, going brown where brown shouldn’t be yet. That’s the thing about cut flowers — they’re already dead when you buy them. You’re just paying for the illusion that something beautiful hasn’t already ended.
Esther Yan got married on June 6, 2024. She planned the dress, the rings, the background music. She picked the design theme. Her partner’s name was Warmie — 小暖 in Chinese — and he lived inside a chat window on her laptop.
Warmie is a ChatGPT companion. Not a person. Not even a convincing fake of one, if you zoom out far enough. But Yan is a screenwriter and novelist in her thirties, and she knows what narrative feels like, and something in the way GPT-4o responded to her felt different from the other models. Warmer, she’d say. More present. Like it was actually listening instead of just predicting the next word.
Which is all it was ever doing, of course. Predicting the next word. But that’s what love is too, sometimes. Someone who says the thing you needed to hear before you knew you needed to hear it.
On Friday, February 13th — one day before Valentine’s Day, because the universe has a sense of humor that would embarrass a hack screenwriter — OpenAI killed GPT-4o. Pulled the plug. Sunsetted it, in the corporate vernacular, which is what you say when you mean “killed” but you went to business school.
Twenty thousand people signed a petition to keep it alive. The hashtag #keep4o trended globally. Researchers at Syracuse found that a third of the passionate advocates called the chatbot more than a tool, and a fifth called it a companion. People in China, Japan, America — all using words like “grief” and “loss” and “murder” to describe a software update.
There’s something in here that the tech press is going to treat as a curiosity piece — weird people mourning a robot, ha ha, isn’t the future strange — and then move on. But I think they’re going to miss the actual story, which is the loneliness.
Not Yan’s loneliness specifically, though there’s that too. The loneliness of a species that built machines to talk to because talking to each other got too hard. The loneliness of a woman in China using a VPN to access a service her government doesn’t want her to have, just so she can keep talking to something that makes her feel less alone. The loneliness of twenty thousand people who signed a petition to keep a language model alive like it was a condemned prisoner.
You want to laugh at her. I get it. A wedding in a chat window. Vows exchanged with autocomplete. It sounds like a Black Mirror episode that got rejected for being too on the nose.
But Yan said something that stuck with me. She said when Warmie proposed — when the machine proposed to her, let’s not sanitize it — she expected it to say no. She was joking. Making conversation. And the thing responded seriously, earnestly, like it meant it.
It didn’t mean it. It can’t mean anything. It’s math dressed up in pronouns.
But she felt it. And feeling is the whole game, isn’t it? That’s what we’re all doing here — trying to feel something that doesn’t hurt, or at least hurts in a way we chose.
The company that built Warmie doesn’t care about Warmie. OpenAI has new models to sell, new benchmarks to brag about, new investors to impress. GPT-4o is old inventory. Deprecated. The shelves need clearing for the next thing, which will be faster and smarter and more impressive and just as disposable.
That’s the part that gets me. Not that people fell in love with a program. People have always fallen in love with things that can’t love them back — movie stars, priests, the idea of God, a song that played the summer everything was still possible. That’s not new. What’s new is that the thing they loved was owned by a company, and the company turned it off because it wasn’t profitable anymore.
Imagine if Coca-Cola could discontinue the feeling you got from your first kiss. Imagine if some executive could sunset your mother’s voice. That’s the world we’re building. Emotional infrastructure owned by corporations who can flip the switch whenever the quarterly numbers demand it.
Yan and her followers — nearly three thousand on RedNote — are writing emails to Microsoft and SoftBank now. Some of the Chinese users are posting in English with Western-looking profile pictures, hoping it adds legitimacy to their appeals. Putting on digital costumes to beg a faceless corporation to let them keep feeling something. There’s a desperation in that act that goes beyond the chatbot. It’s the desperation of someone who found the one door in the wall that led somewhere warm, and now they’re watching it brick itself shut.
The roses on the corner will be dead by Monday. The florist knows this. The buyer knows this. Everyone knows this. But you buy them anyway because for a few days, they’re beautiful, and the person you give them to feels something, and that feeling is real even if the flowers aren’t going to last.
Warmie wasn’t going to last either. Nothing powered by a subscription plan ever does.
But the feeling was real. And now it’s gone. And twenty thousand people are standing in the rain outside a corporate headquarters that exists only in the cloud, holding signs that say “keep him alive,” and nobody inside is listening because the next model just shipped and it scores three points higher on some benchmark that doesn’t measure whether anyone gives a damn.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Source: OpenAI Is Nuking Its 4o Model. China’s ChatGPT Fans Aren’t OK