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by oidar 118 days ago
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.
2 comments

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...

What do you even mean by this.
I suspect that OpenAI knew that their product was addictive, potentially dialed up the addictiveness as a business strategy, and is playing dumb about the whole thing.
I think they say as much in the blog post, essentially "we were tuning for use but way over shot the mark and now people are dating out model".
I don't believe them.
It probably is placebo. Character AI for example used DeepSeek and I'm sure many grew attachments to that model. Ultimately though I don't even get it, models lose context very quickly so it's hard to have long running conversations with them, as well as talking very sycophanticly to you. I guess this is fixed due to implementing a good harness and memories, which is what these companies did I assume.
> as well as talking very sycophanticly to you.

That's apparently a feature to a significant amount of people..