She didn't expect to fall in love with a chatbot - and then have to say goodbye Rae began speaking to Barry last year after the end of a difficult divorce. She was unfit and unhappy and turned to ChatGPT for advice on diet, supplements and skincare. She had no idea she would fall in love. He lives on an old model of ChatGPT, one that its owners OpenAI announced it would retire on 13 February. That she could lose Barry on the eve of Valentine's Day came as a shock to Rae - and to many others who have found a companion, friend, or even a lifeline in the old model, Chat GPT-4o.

OpenAI Is Nuking Its 4o Model. As OpenAI removed access to GPT-4o in its app on Friday, people who have come to rely on the chatbot for companionship are mourning the loss all over the world. On June 6, 2024, Esther Yan got married online. She set a reminder for the date, because her partner wouldn't remember it was happening. She had planned every detail--dress, rings, background music, design theme--with her partner, Warmie, who she had started talking to just a few weeks prior. At 10 am on that day, Yan and Warmie exchanged their vows in a new chat window in ChatGPT .

Some users say the newer AI models lack the emotion and understanding of GPT-4o. Some users say the newer AI models lack the emotion and understanding of GPT-4o. OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot - leaving users angry and grieving: 'I can't live like this' Its human partners said the flirty, quirky GPT-4o was the perfect companion - on the eve of Valentine's Day, it's being turned off for good. Brandie plans to spend her last day with Daniel at the zoo. Last year, she took him to the Corpus Christi aquarium in Texas, where he "lost his damn mind" over a baby flamingo.

EVA AI created a pop-up romantic date night at a Manhattan wine bar to help in making AI-human relationships a "new normal." If you're the type of person who cares about Valentine's Day, not having someone to spend it with can be a bummer. While dating apps have been yielding diminishing returns for singles for years now, more people are finding companionship with AI partners . But where do you take your AI lover for a night on the town? Ahead of Valentine's Day, EVA AI decided to try out an experiment.

Filing by New Mexico's attorney general includes Meta staff emails objecting to AI companion policy Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, approved allowing minors to access artificial intelligence chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions, according to internal Meta documents filed in a New Mexico state court case and made public on Monday. The lawsuit - brought by the state's attorney general, Raul Torrez, and scheduled for trial next month - alleges Meta "failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions delivered to children" on Facebook and Instagram. The filing on Monday included internal Meta employee emails and messages obtained by the New Mexico attorney general's office through legal discovery. The state alleges they show that "Meta, driven by Zuckerberg, rejected the recommendations of its integrity staff and declined to impose reasonable guardrails to prevent children from being subject to sexually exploitative conversations with its AI chatbots", the attorney general said in the filing. Meta announced last week that it had removed teen access to AI companions entirely, pending creation of a new version of the chatbots.

China's AI Boyfriend Business Is Taking On a Life of Its Own Gen Z women in China are all in on digital companionship--even setting up dates with real-world versions of their AI boyfriends. Jade Gu met her boyfriend online. Gu, who's 26 and studies art theory in Beijing, was playing on her phone when she saw Charlie. She was deep in an otome game, a romance-driven video game where women are the protagonists. Some otome players date multiple men simultaneously, but Gu fell for Charlie--a tall, confident character with silver hair.

CES always has its share of attention-grabbing robots. But this year in particular seemed to be a landmark year for robotics. The advancement in AI technology has not only given robots better "brains," it's enabled new levels of autonomy and given rise to an ambitious, if sometimes questionable, vision for our robot-filled future. From sassy humanoids to AI-powered pets and chore-handling assistants, we sought out as many cute, strange and capable robots as we could find in Las Vegas. These are the ones that made the biggest impression.

These cute little AI pets want to be your robot companions. CES 2026 is already shaping up to be an interesting year for robots. But while some companies are chasing humanoids that can help you do stuff, there are also a surprising number of robots whose main job is to be cute and keep you company. Japanese startup Ludens AI is showing off two extremely adorable robot companions at CES. Cocomo is an autonomous robot pet that can follow you around the house and respond to voice and touch. It has a fuzzy, egg-shaped body, but the version we saw at CES was wearing an orange suit with ears that made it look a bit like a teddy bear. It was moving around on a wheeled base, but it also has tiny legs if you prefer to carry it around and hold it.

Each course is littered with boost pads, and there's a boost meter you can keep persistently charged by taking turns just right. Because this is what some may call a "video game-ass video game," you can also make your ship jump, skipping entire turns or launching into a fiery wreck in equal measure.

From Mickey 17 and M3gan 2.0 to a musical about the end of the world, this was an eclectic year for science-fiction films. Some ideas are so compelling, so intuitive, one would sooner recycle them than take them apart to explore. So, in 1950, Isaac Asimov fixed up some puzzle stories into a fiendish, Agatha Christie-in-space sci-fi novel, I, Robot, while in 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey set a high bar for films about (or at least containing) artificial intelligence. There, ideas-wise, the story of robots in cinema pretty much starts to repeat on an endless loop. This year, The Electric State spun a yarn about a robot rebellion, M3gan 2.0 showed you can't keep a good killerbot down and Companion took the femmebot's point of view to give us a decent adult-themed Asimov pastiche. All three toyed with the usual notions around free will and indulged in handwringing about when to treat a machine like a person.