The outcry when 4o was discontinued was such that open AI kept it on paying subscriptions. There are at least enough people attached to certain AI voices that it warrants a tech startup spending the resources to keep an old model around. That’s probably not an insignificant population.

I think it IS 0.1% (or less, hopefully) of the population.

But it’s hard to study users having these relationships without studying the users who have these relationships I reckon.

The Stanford Prison Experiment only had 24 participants and implementation problems that should have concerned anyone with a pulse. But it’s been taught for decades.

A lot of psych research uses small samples. It’s a problem, but funding is limited and so it’s a start. Other researchers can take this and build upon it.

Anecdotally, watching people meltdown over the end of ChatGPT 4o indicates this is a bigger problem that 0.1%. And business wise, it would be odd if OpenAI kept an entire model available to serve that small a population.

My new startup is named TamagotchAI..