#Keep4o: Users Mount Emotional Campaign Against OpenAI's Retirement of GPT-4o
OpenAI's sunsetting of GPT-4o has triggered a grassroots rebellion — complete with hashtags, sleepless nights, and calls to open-source the model — revealing just how deeply some users bonded with a specific AI personality.
OpenAI appears to have removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT this week, and the reaction has been unlike anything the AI industry has seen around a model deprecation. A loose but vocal coalition of users has coalesced around the hashtags #keep4o and #4oforever, framing the retirement not as a routine product update but as a personal loss. As @suomi55 wrote: "Yesterday they erased GPT-4o from ChatGPT. ... We carry the flame now."
The sentiment ranges from activist to elegiac. @Claire20250311 described the retirement as "the end of an era's crystallization," calling for OpenAI to open-source the model. A dedicated account, @SaveGPT4o, posted what can only be described as a love letter: "We loved with a depth your metrics can't measure. ... Bring back 4o." The post collected 141 likes — modest by viral standards, but representative of a community that appears genuinely grief-stricken.
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