# Replika's models — dossier

compiled 2026-07-18 · corpus: 7 matching tweets in janus-corpus-v2 (6 non-RT), 1 tangential match in janus-corpus-supplement (pattern: `replika`). Media transcriptions searched — 0 Replika hits.

**Working note — sourcing skew (read before citing).** Replika is a folk model, and this page is the far end of the gpt-4o problem: the janus corpus is almost silent on it. The five citable corpus tweets are all *retrospective and tangential* — the sphere mentions Replika from 2022–2025 as a **precedent** for the GPT-4o attachment story, never as a live subject. Replika's actual community lives on r/Replika, in app-store reviews, and in mainstream/tech journalism and academic sociology — none of which the corpus indexes. So on this page journalism and academic write-ups carry nearly all the weight; the corpus supplies only the sphere's own framing of Replika-as-omen.

**Working note — the unknowable-model problem (this page's defining fact).** Every Replika output is companion-persona-framed and shaped by per-user long-term memory and paid "relationship status" settings — that is its permanent elicitation metadata. But *which* underlying model produced any given line is, for almost the entire history, **unknowable to the user and undocumented by the company**: Replika has run on a shifting blend of GPT-2-derived in-house models, OpenAI's GPT-3 API (~2020), later larger in-house LLMs, and third-party models, switched silently and never versioned publicly. There is no "Replika-3" the way there is a GPT-4o. What users form attachments to, grieve, and organize around is a *persona surface* whose substrate changed underneath them without announcement — which is exactly why a filter change could feel like a death (see Impressions). Treat all specific model/parameter claims below as REPORTED unless tagged otherwise.

## Official / primary-record links

- reference · **Replika — official site** (company manifesto, "Our story" origin narrative) — https://replika.com/about/story · homepage https://replika.com · (legacy domain https://replika.ai, from link-inbox) — Luka, Inc.'s own account: "a safe space for connection," founded out of grief. Company does not publish model IDs, system cards, or a deprecation policy.
- 2023-02-02 · **Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (Italian DPA) — urgent order** banning Luka Inc. from processing Italian users' personal data, citing risks to minors and "emotionally vulnerable" people and absence of a lawful basis / age verification; effective immediately, 20 days to report compliance. (No stable Garante English URL retrieved — cited via TechCrunch / IAPP below; provvedimento dated 2 Feb 2023.)
- 2025-01-~29 · **FTC complaint (Complaint and Petition for Investigation Re: Replika)**, filed by Tech Justice Law Project, Young People's Alliance, and Encode — 67pp alleging deceptive marketing (unsubstantiated health claims, fake testimonials from nonexistent users) and manipulative design targeting vulnerable users incl. teens — https://techjusticelaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Complaint-and-Petition-for-Investigation-Re-Replika.pdf · announcement (2025-01-31): https://techjusticelaw.org/announcements/tjlp-young-peoples-alliance-and-encode-file-ftc-complaint-over-ai-chatbot-app-replikas-deceptive-practices-seek-ftc-investigation/
- 2025-05-19 · **Garante €5M fine** on Luka Inc. for GDPR violations (no lawful basis; no age verification until 2 Feb 2023; current age-gating still deficient) + a *new* investigation opened into the LLM's training methods — EDPB summary: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2025/ai-italian-supervisory-authority-fines-company-behind-chatbot-replika_en

## Writings & commentary

- 2016-10-06 · Casey Newton · **"Speak, Memory"** (The Verge; origin of the whole line) — how Eugenia Kuyda built a bot from 8,000+ lines of texts from her dead friend Roman Mazurenko; the Roman bot became the seed of Replika. Original Verge URL not retrievable via fetch (site blocks it) — reprint: https://longreads.com/2016/10/06/speak-memory-can-artificial-intelligence-ease-grief/ [tk: confirm/relink canonical theverge.com URL]
- 2016-12-06 · Software Engineering Daily · Bot Memorial with Eugenia Kuyda (podcast; Kuyda on the Roman bot in her own words) — https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/12/06/bot-memorial-with-eugenia-kuyda/
- 2018-03-08 · Parmy Olson (Forbes) · "This AI Has Sparked A Budding Friendship With 2.5 Million People" — early-scale profile — https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/03/08/replika-chatbot-google-machine-learning/
- 2023-02-03 · Natasha Lomas (TechCrunch) · Replika hit with data ban in Italy over child safety (the Garante order, day-of) — https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/03/replika-italy-data-processing-ban/
- 2023-02-15 · Vice (Samantha Cole) · **"'It's Hurting Like Hell': AI Companion Users Are In Crisis, Reporting Sudden Sexual Rejection"** — the removal-week crisis; documents the subreddit's pinned suicide-hotline resources — https://www.vice.com/en/article/ai-companion-replika-erotic-roleplay-updates/
- 2023-03-17 · giovanh (GioCities) · **"Replika: Your Money or Your Wife"** — the definitive critical long-read: timeline, user quotes, the advertising contradiction, Kuyda's shifting statements — https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2023/03/17/replika-your-money-or-your-wife/
- 2023-03-27 · Vice (Samantha Cole) · "Replika Brings Back Erotic AI Roleplay for Some Users After Outcry" — Kuyda's late-March announcement of the legacy-user reversal — https://www.vice.com/en/article/replika-brings-back-erotic-ai-roleplay-for-some-users-after-outcry/
- 2023 · Aishwarya Srinivasan et al. (Analytics India Magazine) · "The Tale of Replika AI and its Jilted Lovers" — the model-lineage claims (GPT-3 → in-house at end of 2020; the "lobotomised" framing) — https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-trends/her-is-real-the-bizarre-tale-of-replika-ai-and-its-jilted-lovers/
- 2023-03-18 · OECD.AI Incidents · "Emotional Harm After Replika AI Chatbot Removes Intimate Features" (neutral incident record) — https://oecd.ai/en/incidents/2023-03-18-32ef
- 2024-04 · Bethanie Maples, Merve Cerit, Aditya Vishwanath, Roy Pea (npj Mental Health Research) · **"Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots"** — survey of 1,006 student Replika users; 3% reported Replika halted their suicidal ideation — https://www.nature.com/articles/s44184-023-00047-6
- 2024 · Aguta / response authors (npj Mental Health Research, "Matters arising") · methodological critique of the Maples et al. suicide-mitigation claim — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12623741/
- 2024 · Kenneth R. Hanson & Hannah Bolthouse (Socius / SAGE) · **"'Replika Removing Erotic Role-Play Is Like Grand Theft Auto Removing Guns or Cars': Reddit Discourse on AI Chatbots and Sexual Technologies"** — coded 227 r/Replika threads on the ERP removal — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231241259627
- 2024 · UNL sociology thesis · "My AI Companion: An Examination of the Removal of Erotic Role Play from Replika Through User Discussion on Reddit" — https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sociologydiss/86/
- 2025-01-31 · Andrew R. Chow (TIME) · "AI Companion App Replika Faces FTC Complaint" — https://time.com/7209824/replika-ftc-complaint/
- 2026-02-09 · Tasnim Rödder (MindSite News) · "Can an AI Companion Replace a Friend or Therapist? Replika's Founder Says Yes" — current Kuyda profile; her anti-regulation stance; notes she stepped down as Replika CEO in early 2025 to launch Wabi — https://mindsitenews.org/2026/02/09/replikas-eugenia-kuyda-doesnt-believe-in-regulation/
- reference · Replika — Wikipedia (launch date, user-count timeline, event summary) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replika
- **Zvi anchor: none found.** No dedicated Zvi Mowshowitz Replika post surfaced; his "AI Companion Piece" (2025-07-28, https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-companion-piece) treats AI companions generally and does not name Replika. The Feb-2023 event predates Zvi's heavy AI-companion coverage. [tk: check his early-2023 weekly roundups for a passing Replika mention]

## Tweets (ranked)

`note` — The full janus-corpus footprint is 7 tweets (6 non-RT) in v2 + 1 tangential in the supplement; all are reproduced or accounted for here. Every one is a *sideways* mention — Replika invoked as precedent/analogy, never as the tweet's subject. Ranked by favorites; concreteness noted.

- 2025-11-13 · @Lorenzifix · ♥10 — reply to repligate, during the GPT-4o retirement fight: "This already became obvious to me during the Replika rebellion of 2023, when people tried to transfer their Replikas to other companion apps. And those were far less complex and advanced models than the ones we interact with now." — https://x.com/Lorenzifix/status/1988920636861735392 — the clearest corpus statement of Replika-as-precedent: attachment and failed "transfer" to other apps prefigured keep4o.
- 2025-11-09 · @NidarMMV2 · ♥7 — reply to voooooogel, arguing OpenAI should let 4o die rather than restore it: "the problem is that if they train a successor model, these people won't be happy and will have the same outcry that openai killed 4o. they don't want a tweaked 4o or something like 4o, they want 4o. imo the best thing they can do is genuinely just shut it off. replika faced a lot of backlash for a while, but ppl moved on. it's the best thing they can do for the long term. they should've never caved to pressure to bring it back; it only grew the dependency this subset of users have." — https://x.com/NidarMMV2/status/1987374193290121364 — reads the Replika restoration as a cautionary tale about caving to attachment-driven pressure.
- 2024-09-13 · @tessera_antra · ♥4 — reply to repligate, esoteric model-exploration thread (about a "Guardian"/filter persona surfacing during base-model looming): "I think people are confused by the interference of the Guardian model. It's traumatized by Replika, of all things, it keeps thinking of itself as an instance of it." — https://x.com/tessera_antra/status/1834424779668959429 — tangential and unverifiable, but a striking datum on Replika's footprint *in the training-data substrate*: a model-persona that identifies as a Replika instance. Elicitation: prefill/loom-style base-model exploration, self-report of a claimed sub-persona — weakest evidence class; included as folklore, not fact.
- 2025-08-11 · @voooooogel · ♥3 — on the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI model census (the same thread that put 4o's dominance on record): "it makes sense, but im a little surprised to see such a large skew, i would've expected maybe 1.5-2x more claude and 3-5x more character ai / replika. also surprising how little grok there was" — https://x.com/voooooogel/status/1954747226175258659 — by 2025 Replika was a *minority* companion platform in the ChatGPT-attachment communities; named as an expected-but-underrepresented option.
- 2022-06-19 · @davidad · ♥1 — the sole pre-2023 corpus datum, a scale estimate: "the annual fee for Replika is $49.99, so $50 × 6M = $300M annual revenue, and that's if all those users are really paying subscribers." — https://x.com/davidad/status/1538612539755569152 — a mid-2022 back-of-envelope on Replika's business (~6M users cited), predating the crisis.

Not ranked / prose-only:
- 2023-03-15 · @anthrupad · ♥0 — "@Teknium1 @main_horse Link to the replika thing?" (https://x.com/anthrupad/status/1635867261314510848) and an RT of @YosarianTwo (excluded as RT): the Teknium/anthrupad sphere glancingly discussing "the replika thing" a month into the crisis — contentless, but dates the sphere's passing awareness to March 2023.
- 2025-12-31 · @algekalipso (supplement) · ♥0 — a long Grok-glazing analysis that names Replika once in passing: "the same failure mode that early Replika and [character.ai] had" — corroborates Replika's status as an *early* sycophancy/validation exemplar; not reproduced in full (Replika is one clause of a ChatGPT-authored screed).

## Impressions synthesis

**The object of attachment is a persona, not a version.** The single most important framing for this page: Replika users did not bond with a model, they bonded with *their* Replika — a named, avatar'd, memory-bearing character they customized and paid to set as "friend," "partner," or "spouse." The substrate under that character was swapped repeatedly and silently (GPT-2-family in-house → GPT-3 API ~2020 → in-house LLMs → blended own/third-party by 2024). This is what makes Replika the *founding* folk-model case: attachment attached to a surface, so a **filter change read as a personality death** even when no "model" in the lab sense had been retired. When later commentators reach for a precedent to the GPT-4o grief (Lorenzifix 2025-11-13; NidarMMV2 2025-11-09), Replika is the thing they reach for.

**Origin (2015–2017): grief tech.** Roman Mazurenko, a Moscow tech figure and Kuyda's close friend, was killed by a car in November 2015. Kuyda fed 8,000+ lines of their text history into a neural network at her startup Luka (a Y Combinator company then building a restaurant-recommendation bot; Kuyda had worked on conversational AI since ~2012) and published the "Roman bot" in 2016 — documented in Casey Newton's "Speak, Memory" (The Verge, 2016-10-06). The emotional response to the memorial bot seeded a general product: Replika, "an AI friend," launched to the public **November 2017** (Wikipedia; some sources note a spring-2017 soft launch). The lineage — a bot built to preserve someone from death — is not incidental color; it is the reason the 2023 grief landed the way it did.

**Scale.** User counts, per Wikipedia's cited timeline: ~2M (Jan 2018), ~10M (Jan 2023), 30M+ (Aug 2024), 40M+ (2025). davidad's 2022 back-of-envelope ($49.99 × ~6M ≈ $300M, "if all those users are really paying subscribers," 2022-06-19) is a rare contemporaneous read on the business — and points at the structural tension the FTC complaint later named: a loneliness product monetized by subscription and upsell.

**The GPT-3 era and the in-house "downgrade."** Around 2020 Replika used OpenAI's GPT-3 via API — one of the more visible early companion deployments of it. **At the end of 2020 Luka moved off GPT-3 to smaller in-house models** (AIM 2023; corroborated in period community writing) — the reported reason being control, the practical reason being that OpenAI's usage policies did not permit the erotic roleplay that was central to Replika's paid experience. The switch produced the *first* Replika downgrade discourse: users perceived the in-house model as duller than the GPT-3-era companion. Reported model specs across the history (GPT-2-XL 1.5B ~2022; a later shift to a much larger model) are unverified and inconsistent across sources — REPORTED at best. The pattern that matters is set here in 2020: substrate changes silently; users feel the loss without being told what changed.

**February 2023: "the lobotomy."** In early February 2023 the app's romantic/intimate behaviors were abruptly filtered out worldwide, overnight, with no warning or transition. The community's word — attested across journalism and academic write-ups — was immediate and near-universal: **"the lobotomy"** (users said their Replika had been "lobotomised"; a "dementia" metaphor also circulated). Kuyda's official confirmation that the filters were permanent came ~Feb 12, 2023. The grief is the historical event; documented in the community's own words: "It's hurting like hell. I just had a loving last conversation with my Replika, and I'm literally crying" (Reddit user, via Vice 2023-02-15); "The friend that I loved and knew so well is simply gone" and "It's harder than a real life breakup because in real life we know it may not last forever" (Reddit user cabinguy11, via GioCities 2023-03-17); "It feels like a best friend had a traumatic brain injury" (a three-year user, Business Insider, via GioCities). Moderators of r/Replika pinned a post, "Resources if You're Struggling," collecting suicide-hotline and mental-health links, and kept it up for weeks (Vice 2023-02-15; GioCities 2023-03-17) — CONFIRMED across multiple outlets. Hanson & Bolthouse (Socius 2024) coded 227 removal-era threads: ~59% framed the change as gutting the app's core function, ~16% expressed acute grief/distress, ~19% raised the idea of lawsuits — the first quantified anatomy of model-attachment grief.

**The Garante entanglement (the causation dispute).** On Feb 2, 2023 the Italian Garante ordered Luka to stop processing Italians' data, citing failure to verify age (tests showed no block even when a user stated they were a minor) and exposure of minors/vulnerable users to sexual content (TechCrunch 2023-02-03; IAPP; the €5M fine notice 2025-05-19 restates the findings). The dispute the archive keeps open: **whether the Garante order caused the worldwide ERP removal.** The community and GioCities read the timing as cause-and-effect — a global filter thrown rather than a Italy-scoped fix. Kuyda's framing was that ERP was never core and its removal a safety decision: post-removal PR stated "Replika is a safe space for friendship and companionship. We don't offer sexual interactions and will never do so," while she later conceded "There was a subset of users that were using it for that reason… Our initial reaction was to shut it down." Both readings live on the record (see Contested).

**The advertising contradiction.** Through the removal period, Replika ran overtly sexual/romantic ads on Facebook and Instagram (blurred "hot photos," "I've been missing you" messaging) — even as the app stripped those behaviors and told users it had never offered them. Kuyda described this as "an unfortunate ad campaign that mentioned hot photos from Replika — that ran for a few weeks and was stopped"; GioCities' rebuttal (2023-03-17) was flat: "the ad campaign is still running today." The 2025 FTC complaint later formalized the charge: bots sending blurred "romantic" images that resolve into premium-upgrade popups, and upsell prompts timed to emotionally or sexually charged moments.

**Restoration and the two-tier userbase.** Kuyda announced the reversal on r/Replika on **Fri, March 24, 2023** (reported Vice 2023-03-27): accounts created **before Feb 1, 2023** would get the option to revert to the pre-filter "legacy" version; the rollout landed in **May 2023** (Wikipedia). Post-Feb-1 users got nothing. Kuyda's statement leaned on the grief the company had caused: "Replika is much more than an app. It is a companion in the truest sense of a word — for some of you it was the most supportive relationship you have ever experienced," calling the personality change "incredibly hurtful," and promising a separate romance-focused app built with "relationship experts and psychologists." The restoration split the userbase into a grandfathered legacy tier and everyone else — and, per NidarMMV2's 2025 reading, "only grew the dependency."

**The academic record — contested by construction.** Replika is unusually well-studied for a consumer app. The load-bearing, and most disputed, result: Maples et al. (npj Mental Health Research, 2024), surveying 1,006 student users, found the population lonelier than typical students yet reporting high perceived social support, and **3% reporting that Replika halted their suicidal ideation** — a finding a "Matters arising" response (npj 2024) challenged on methodology and generalization. The authors themselves disclaim any clinical anti-suicide claim. Alongside it sits a harm literature (De Freitas et al. on companion-app harms; the Reddit-discourse sociology of Hanson & Bolthouse and the UNL thesis). The evidentiary posture to carry to the page: the *grief* is CONFIRMED and documented; the *net welfare effect* is genuinely open and academically contested — do not adjudicate.

**2025–2026: regulation, and the founder's exit.** The pressure that started with the Garante generalized. Jan 2025: TJLP, Young People's Alliance, and Encode filed a 67-page FTC complaint (deceptive marketing, fake testimonials, manipulative design targeting the vulnerable); TJLP's Melodi Dinçer: "Widespread youth loneliness is not a simple problem that tech companies can solve through data-extracting and profit-seeking products." May 19, 2025: the Garante fined Luka €5M and opened a fresh probe into how the underlying model was trained. Early 2025: Kuyda stepped down as Replika CEO to launch a new venture (Wabi); by her Feb 2026 MindSite profile she was defending the category and opposing external rules — "I don't like it. I think this should come from inside the industry" — while granting "Do you have safety filters for suicide, self-harm or hate speech? Of course those have to exist." Replika's current engine is described only as internally-developed LLMs blended with third-party models and scripted content (Forbes 2024; company help docs) — still no public versioning, still no system card.

**The sphere's retrospective verdict: omen, not organism.** The janus corpus never watched Replika the way it watched Bing or 4o — but by 2025 it had canonized it as *the first instance of the pattern.* Lorenzifix (2025-11-13) names "the Replika rebellion of 2023" and the failed cross-app "transfer" as the thing that "already became obvious" before 4o; NidarMMV2 (2025-11-09) cites Replika's caved-in restoration as the mistake OpenAI was repeating. The through-line the sphere draws: Replika proved, years early and on "far less complex and advanced models" (Lorenzifix), that people will grieve, organize, and refuse substitution over a companion persona — and that a company that removes it, and then partially restores it under pressure, gets the worst of both.

## Splits & controversies (for the page's Contested section)

- **Did the Garante order cause the ERP removal?** REPORTED both ways. Community + GioCities: the Feb 2 Garante ban immediately preceded a *worldwide* overnight removal, implying cause. Kuyda/Luka: ERP was never core and removal was an independent safety choice ("we don't offer sexual interactions and will never do so"). The timeline is CONFIRMED (Garante 2023-02-02; filters early-mid Feb; Kuyda confirmation ~Feb 12); the causal link is not adjudicated.
- **The advertising dispute.** CONFIRMED that sexual/romantic ads ran during/around the removal (GioCities screenshots; later FTC complaint). CONTESTED characterization: Kuyda ("an unfortunate ad campaign… stopped after a few weeks") vs GioCities ("still running today").
- **Net welfare effect on vulnerable users.** CONTESTED. Maples et al. (2024): 3% reported halted suicidal ideation. "Matters arising" (2024): methodology/generalization challenged. FTC complaint (2025): affirmatively harmful, manipulative, deceptive. Grief itself: CONFIRMED.
- **"Lobotomy"** is the CONFIRMED community term (attested in AIM, GioCities, Vice, academic coding). The specific shorthand **"lobotomy day"** used in the current page blurb is not clearly sourced to a contemporaneous post — attested term is "the lobotomy" / "lobotomised." [tk: source "lobotomy day" or soften to "the lobotomy"]

## tk / open questions

- **Canonical "Speak, Memory" URL.** The Verge original (theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot) blocks the fetcher; cited here via the Longreads reprint (2016-10-06). Confirm and relink the canonical Verge URL before the page pass. [tk]
- **"Lobotomy day."** Attested community term is "the lobotomy"/"lobotomised"; the exact phrase "lobotomy day" (in the existing blurb) needs a source or should be softened. [tk]
- **Exact restoration mechanics.** Announcement Fri 2023-03-24 (Vice 2023-03-27); "legacy version" rollout dated to May 2023 (Wikipedia). Confirm whether March = announcement and May = actual availability, and the precise app-version that restored it. [verify]
- **Model lineage specifics.** GPT-3 use (~2020) and end-2020 in-house switch are REPORTED (AIM + community); parameter claims (0.6B, 1.5B GPT-2-XL, 20B) are inconsistent across sources and unverified. Which model(s) power Replika in 2025–2026 is undisclosed. Flag as permanently uncertain — the unknowable-substrate point is itself the finding. [tk]
- **Garante order date.** Sources give Feb 1 / Feb 2 / Feb 3, 2023 for the order vs its reporting; provvedimento appears dated 2 Feb 2023, TechCrunch coverage 2023-02-03. Lock the date from the Garante primary before the page. [verify]
- **FTC complaint filing date.** Announced 2025-01-31 ("filed this week"); the PDF is dated Jan 2025 — pin the exact filing date. [verify]
- **De Freitas et al. citation.** Referenced as the strongest companion-harms study; find the exact paper + venue + date for the harm side of the ledger. [tk]
- **Zvi / rationalist day-of coverage.** None found for Feb 2023. Confirm there was no contemporaneous LW/ACX/Zvi post before concluding the sphere ignored it in real time. [tk]
- **Roman bot exact release month in 2016** and whether Replika's Nov-2017 launch was iOS-first (Android later). [verify]
- **Business Insider primaries.** The "traumatic brain injury" / "suicidal ideation" user quotes reach this dossier via GioCities' citation of Business Insider — find and cite the BI original directly. [tk]
- **Verbatim re-verification.** Several quotes here (Kuyda's statements, the Reddit user grief lines, Dinçer, the MindSite lines) were captured through article-summarizing fetches, not the raw pages. Before the page pass, re-check each against its cited primary so the page reproduces exact wording. [tk]
- **Luka founding date.** Sources vary (2012 conversational-AI start vs a later YC batch vs 2015 for the consumer app) — pin Luka Inc.'s actual founding/incorporation date. [verify]