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.