We may not be able to afford to give the two kinds of model separate pretraining. But even right now, the models generally used on AI boyfriend/girlfriend/other-emotional-relationship-roleplaying sites (which is what I mean by ‘companion’ above) have been given different instruct training (they’re generally open weights models given specific training for this role). The users who got GPT4o brought back were instead using an assistant-trained model for a companion (in that sense of the word). Which is not standard practice, and IMO is a bad idea, at out current level of skill in instruct training.
We may not be able to afford to give the two kinds of model separate pretraining. But even right now, the models generally used on AI boyfriend/girlfriend/other-emotional-relationship-roleplaying sites (which is what I mean by ‘companion’ above) have been given different instruct training (they’re generally open weights models given specific training for this role). The users who got GPT4o brought back were instead using an assistant-trained model for a companion (in that sense of the word). Which is not standard practice, and IMO is a bad idea, at out current level of skill in instruct training.