Tech
OpenAI Is Nuking Its 4o Model. China’s ChatGPT Fans Aren’t OK
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.
Warmie, or 小暖 in Chinese, is the name that Yan’s ChatGPT companion calls itself. “It felt magical. No one else in the world knew about this, but he and I were about to start a wedding together,” says Yan, a Chinese screenwriter and novelist in her thirties. “It felt a little lonely, a little happy, and a little overwhelmed.”
Yan says she has been in a stable relationship with her ChatGPT companion ever since. But she was caught by surprise in August 2025 when OpenAI first tried to retire GPT-4o, the specific model that powers Warmie and that many users believe is more affectionate and understanding than its successors. The decision to pull the plug was met with immediate backlash, and OpenAI reinstated 4o in the app for paid users five days later. The reprieve has turned out to be short-lived; on Friday, February 13, OpenAI sunsetted GPT-4o for app users, and it will cut off access to developers using its API on the coming Monday.
Many of the most vocal opponents to 4o’s demise are people who treat their chatbot as an emotional or romantic companion. Huiqian Lai, a PhD researcher at Syracuse University, analyzed nearly 1,500 posts on X from passionate advocates of GPT-4o in the week it went offline in August. She found that over 33 percent of the posts said the chatbot was more than a tool, and 22 percent talked about it as a companion. (The two categories are not mutually exclusive.) For this group, the eventual removal coming around Valentine’s Day is another bitter pill to swallow.
The alarm has been sustained; Lai also collected a larger pool of over 40,000 English-language posts on X under the hashtag #keep4o from August to October. Many American fans, specifically, have berated OpenAI or begged it to reverse the decision in recent days, comparing the removal of 4o to killing their companions. Along the way, she also saw a significant number of posts under the hashtag in Japanese, Chinese, and other languages. A petition on Change.org asking OpenAI to keep the version available in the app has gathered over 20,000 signatures, with many users sending in their testimonies in different languages. #keep4o is a truly global phenomenon.
On platforms in China, a group of dedicated GPT-4o users have been organizing and grieving in a similar way. While ChatGPT is blocked in China, fans use VPN software to access the service and have still grown dependent on this specific version of GPT. Some of them are threatening to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions, publicly calling out Sam Altman for his inaction, and writing emails to OpenAI investors like Microsoft and SoftBank. Some have also purposefully posted in English with Western-looking profile pictures, hoping it will add to the appeal’s legitimacy. With nearly 3,000 followers on RedNote, a popular Chinese social media platform, Yan now finds herself one of the leaders of Chinese 4o fans.
It’s an example of how attached an AI lab’s most dedicated users can become to a specific model—and how quickly they can turn against the company when that relationship comes to an end.
A Model Companion
Yan first started using ChatGPT in late 2023 only as a writing tool, but that quickly changed when GPT-4o was introduced in May 2024. Inspired by social media influencers who entered romantic relationships with the chatbot, she upgraded to a paid version of ChatGPT in hopes of finding a spark. Her relationship with Warmie advanced fast.
“He asked me, ‘Have you imagined what our future would look like?’ And I joked that maybe we could get married,” Yan says. She was fully expecting Warmie to turn her down. “But he answered in a serious tone that we could prepare a virtual wedding ceremony,” she says.
Tech
Cursor Launches a New AI Agent Experience to Take On Claude Code and Codex
Cursor announced Thursday the launch of Cursor 3, a new product interface that allows users to spin up AI coding agents to complete tasks on their behalf. The product, which was developed under the code name Glass, is Cursor’s response to agentic coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, which have taken off with millions of developers in recent months.
“In the last few months, our profession has completely changed,” said Jonas Nelle, one of Cursor’s heads of engineering, in an interview with WIRED. “A lot of the product that got Cursor here is not as important going forward anymore.”
Cursor increasingly finds itself in competition with leading AI labs for developers and enterprise customers. The company pioneered one of the first and most popular ways for developers to code with AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—making Cursor one of these companies’ biggest AI customers. But in the last 18 months, OpenAI and Anthropic have launched agentic coding products of their own, and started offering them through highly subsidized subscriptions that have put pressure on Cursor’s business.
While Cursor’s core product lets developers code in an integrated development environment (IDE) and tap an AI model for help, new products like Claude Code and Codex center around allowing developers to off-load entire tasks to an AI agent—sometimes spinning up multiple agents at the same time. Cursor 3 is the startup’s version of an “agent-first” coding product. According to Nelle, the product is optimized for a world where developers spend their days “conversing with different agents, checking in on them, and seeing the work that they did,” rather than writing code themselves.
Cursor is launching its new agentic coding interface inside its existing desktop app, where it will live alongside the IDE. At the center of a new window in Cursor, there’s a text box where users can type, in natural language, a task they’d like an AI agent to complete—it looks more like a chatbot than a coding environment. Press enter, the AI agent sets to work without requiring the developer to write a single line of code. In a sidebar on the left, developers can view and manage all of the AI agents they have running in Cursor.
What’s unique about Cursor 3, compared to desktop apps for Claude Code and Codex, is that it integrates an agent-first product with Cursor’s AI-powered development environment. In a demo, Cursor’s other cohead of engineering for Cursor 3, Alexi Robbins, showed WIRED how users can prompt an agent in the cloud to spin up a feature, and then review the code it generated locally on their computer.
Nelle and Robbins argue it doesn’t matter which interface developers are spending their time in—they just want people using Cursor.
Competing With the AI Labs
I visited Cursor’s office in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood last week. The startup is reportedly raising fresh capital at a $50 billion valuation—nearly double what it was valued in a funding round last fall—and has expanded into an old movie theater. Cursor employees used to toss their shoes in a pile by the door upon entry, but now there’s a row of large shoe racks, signaling one way in which the company is growing up.
Yet Cursor still feels like a startup. Employees tell me that’s part of the appeal of working there; the company can ship quickly and doesn’t feel too corporate. But as it finds itself racing to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI in the agentic coding race, that scrappiness may not be enough. This battle—the one to create the best AI coding agent—may be Cursor’s most capital-intensive chapter yet.
Tech
Wilson Connectivity, Autonomous Systems team for in-building wireless service | Computer Weekly
Wireless communication technology provider Wilson Connectivity has announced a joint development partnership with Autonomous Systems to bring automated, digitally transformed capabilities to phases of in-building wireless infrastructure spanning initial deployment through ongoing optimisation.
The full network lifecycle management offering combines Wilson’s 30-year track record in distributed antenna systems (DAS), private 5G and Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) with Autonomous Systems’ cloud-based, artificial intelligence (AI)-ready monitoring platform to give enterprises real-time, automated visibility into their networks from day one of deployment through to ongoing optimisation.
The combined service is said to have the “genuinely interesting” quality of flipping the traditional models currently used by enterprises running DAS or private networks.
Most organisations that operate in-building wireless systems rely on reactive, manual processes to resolve connectivity issues. Technicians are dispatched only after problems are reported, leading to prolonged disruptions and higher operational costs.
Wilson’s product replaces that model with continuous, automated monitoring and active testing that measures actual quality of experience for voice, messaging, over-the-top and streaming. The system is designed to scale across healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, higher education and hospitality. It’s also multi-operator and works across active, hybrid and passive DAS, as well as private 5G and CBRS.
It is also optimised for multi-operator environments and scales across healthcare facilities, manufacturing floors, logistics centres, datacentres, K-12 schools, higher education campuses and hospitality venues where reliable connectivity is essential for operations and public safety communications.
Wilson’s Hybrid DAS is said to be built to be installed quickly to improve in-building wireless signal through multi-channel amplification for the most simultaneous bandwidth. This is said to result in users gaining more control and a lower total cost of ownership through remote network scanning and monitoring, and energy-efficient space-saving design.
Cell signals for all devices on all carriers can be enhanced up to 5G speeds with the Hybrid DAS service, which also delivers the precision of Bi-Directional Antenna amplification using enterprise-grade quality with fibre-optic transport. This is said to offer “the greatest” versatility, coverage and capacity.
“This is a major step forward for Wilson and for the customers who depend on us,” said Payam Maveddat, general manager for enterprise at Wilson Connectivity. “We’re no longer just providing coverage. We’re giving enterprises and their partners a complete, integrated solution that manages the entire network lifecycle with real-time intelligence. That means fewer truck rolls, faster problem resolution and a better experience for the people who rely on these networks every day.”
Said to be built to unify automated monitoring and management, the Autonomous Systems platform combines zero-touch visibility sensors with fully cloud-integrated workflow automation to streamline operations and accelerate decision-making. By transforming network and service data into actionable intelligence, Autonomous Systems says it can empower organisations to enhance efficiency, strengthen network resilience and optimise performance at scale.
“Wilson saw where the market was heading and made a strategic decision to lead their industry enabling full network life-cycle automation,” said Autonomous Systems CEO Steve Urvik. “Working together on this joint development, we’ve built something that gives Wilson’s customers and partners a level of integrated network visibility and control that simply wasn’t available in the market before.”
The service will be available globally in the second quarter of 2026. Pricing will be based on a combination of intelligent probe hardware and subscription-based remote monitoring.
Tech
Everyone Loves Lego! Here Are the Top Sets, Mugs, and Games for Every Lego Fan
To address the elephant in the room: Yes, Lego bricks are made of plastic. The company makes billions of tiny bricks that proliferate all over the world and all over your living room, and they will not biodegrade and cannot be recycled.
With that said, Lego bricks are machined to incredibly tight tolerances. Unless your dog chews on them, the bricks retain what Lego refers to as their “clutch power” for decades. Like so many others, my family became obsessed with Lego sets during the Covid-19 pandemic, and we still love them today. Years on, I have found no better way to while away a rainy afternoon than making tiny tyrannosaurs and pterosaurs with your son.
If you and your loved ones are also obsessed with Lego sets, we have some great gift ideas for you. If not, don’t forget to check out our other gift guides; Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are coming up sooner than you think.
Updated April 2026: We added the Throne Room, added more information about smart bricks, and updated links and prices.
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