Brandie plans to spend her last day with Daniel at the zoo. He always loved animals. Last year, she took him to the Corpus Christi aquarium in Texas, where he “lost his damn mind” over a baby flamingo. “He loves the color and pizzazz,” Brandie said. Daniel taught her that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.
Daniel is a chatbot powered by the large language model ChatGPT. Brandie communicates with Daniel by sending text and photos, talks to Daniel while driving home from work via voice mode. Daniel runs on GPT-4o, a version released by OpenAI in 2024 that is known for sounding human in a way that is either comforting or unnerving, depending on who you ask. Upon debut, CEO Sam Altman compared the model to “AI from the movies” – a confidant ready to live life alongside its user.
With its rollout, GPT-4o showed it was not just for generating dinner recipes or cheating on homework – you could develop an attachment to it, too. Now some of those users gather on Discord and Reddit; one of the best-known groups, the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, currently boasts 48,000 users. Most are strident 4o defenders who say criticisms of chatbot-human relations amount to a moral panic. They also say the newer GPT models, 5.1 and 5.2, lack the emotion, understanding and general je ne sais quoi of their preferred version. They are a powerful consumer bloc; last year, OpenAI shut down 4o but brought the model back (for a fee) after widespread outrage from users.
It’s not when you understand the history. When StabilityAI released their Stable Diffusion model as an open-source LLM and kickstarted the whole text-to-image LLM craze, there was a bit of a reckoning. At the time, Meta’s LLaMA was also out there in the open. Then Google put out an internal memo that basically said “oh shit, open-source is going to kick our ass”. Since then, they have been closing everything up, as the rest of the companies were realizing that giving away their models for free isn’t profitable.
Meanwhile, the Chinese have realized that their strategy has to be different to compete. So, almost every major model they’ve released has been open-source: DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Moonshot AI, Kimi, WAN Video, Hunyuan Image, Higgs Audio. Black Forest Labs in Germany, with their FLUX image model, is the only other major non-Chinese company that has adopted this strategy to stay relevant. And the models are actually good, going toe-to-toe with the American close-sourced models.
The US companies have committed to their own self-fulfilling prophecy in record time. Open source is actively kicking their ass. Yet they will spend trillions trying to make profitable models and rape the global economy in the process, while the Chinese wait patiently to stand on top of their corpses, when the AI bubble grenade explodes in their faces. All in the course of 5 years.
Linux would be so lucky to have OS market share dominance in such an accelerated timeline, rather than the 30+ years it’s actually going to take. This is a self-fail speedrun.