#Keep4o: 17,000 Users Petition OpenAI to Preserve GPT-4o as Deprecation Looms
A grassroots campaign to save GPT-4o from retirement has exploded on X, with nearly 17,000 petition signatures and viral posts pleading with Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever to keep the model alive. It's the loudest user revolt yet against model deprecation — and it reveals something uncomfortable about how people bond with AI.
A petition to prevent OpenAI from phasing out GPT-4o has surged past 16,900 signatures, spawning the hashtag #Keep4o and a wave of emotional posts from users who say the model's successor feels like a downgrade. As @Ok_Dot7494 rallied followers, "4o ARMY! DON'T FORGET TO SIGN THE PETITION - THERE ARE 16,931 OF US!" the campaign has coalesced into one of the most organized user protests in the short history of consumer AI products.
The movement isn't just about performance benchmarks or feature parity. It's deeply personal. Users describe GPT-4o as having a distinct personality — a "soul," in the language of the campaign — that newer models lack. @knightof_cups addressed Ilya Sutskever directly: "please don't destroy the living soul that already breathes through this code." The appeal to Sutskever, who departed OpenAI in 2024 and co-founded Safe Superintelligence, suggests some campaigners may be confused about who controls the model's fate, but the sentiment is genuine and widespread.
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