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After the backlash to replacing its 4o model with GPT-5, OpenAI will no longer get rid of old models without a heads up.
“In retrospect, not continuing to offer 4o, at least in the interim, was a miss,” Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, said on Tuesday. In an interview with The Verge, he said it was surprising to see the “level of attachment” people had to 4o. “It’s not just change that is difficult for folks, it’s also the fact that people can have such a strong feeling about the personality of a model.”
Turley said that OpenAI was working to bring the “warmth” of 4o to GPT-5. In a Tuesday evening post on X, CEO Sam Altman said the update should also feel “not as annoying (to most users) as GPT-4o.”
Turley said the initial decision to remove 4o was because OpenAI wanted to simplify the model choices it offers to ChatGPT’s 700 million weekly users, the vast majority of whom only use the default model.
“It definitely wasn’t a cost thing,” he said. “In fact, the main thing we were striving for, and we’ve been striving for it for a long time, is simplicity. Because from the average user’s perspective — and there are a lot of average users, they don’t hang out on Reddit or Twitter or any of those spaces — the idea that you have to figure out what model to use for what response is really cognitively overwhelming.
