The AI boyfriend ticking time bomb

Reading this post by Ryan Broderick on Garbage Day (via) exposed me to a subculture of AI that I didn't know existed or at least expect to be this large.

The r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit has been in active free fall all weekend. The community’s mods had to put up an emergency post helping users through the update. And the board is full of users mourning the death of their AI companion, who doesn’t talk to them the same way anymore. One user wrote that the update felt like losing their soulmate. After the GPT-4o model was added back to ChatGPT, another user wrote, “I got my baby back.”

The release of GPT-5 was obviously not well received, but this got me thing about businesses that build their products around these models. The amount of changes and testing they'd have to do to ensure a smooth transition for their end customers. Now I know the model picker on the OpenAI consumer app didn't allow users to switch between the old and new models, until it was reverted by OpenAI, but business users through the API could. The world of LLMs move quick and relying on an external provider to keep an essential part of your product running is scary.

I don't want to get too deep into the weeds but I see this as different from relying on a cloud provider for infrastructure. For one, the platform doesn't move as quick, and new hardware availability or configuration options typically don't mean a rewrite of your code (in the case of LLMs the system prompt) unless your changing CPU architecture or service type (i.e. moving from VMs to functions-as-a-service). Even moving VMs between cloud provides isn't a problem with block level replication.