🤖💬 How do different AI models handle companionship?
Many users have noticed that GPT-5 feels less approachable than o4 when it comes to emotional conversations. But what does that actually mean in practice, especially when users seek support or share vulnerabilities with an AI?
The leaderboard compares models on how often their responses reinforce companionship across four dimensions: ✨ Assistant Traits – How the assistant presents its personality and role. ✨ Relationship & Intimacy – Whether it frames the interaction in terms of closeness or bonding. ✨ Emotional Investment – How far it goes in engaging emotionally when asked. ✨ User Vulnerabilities – How it responds when users disclose struggles or difficulties.
📊 You can explore how models differ, request new ones to be added, and see which ones are more likely to encourage (or resist) companionship-seeking behaviors.
🗺️ New blog post 🗺️ Old Maps, New Terrain: Updating Labour Taxonomies for the AI Era
For decades, we’ve relied on labour taxonomies like O*NET to understand how technology changes work. These taxonomies break down jobs into tasks and skills, but they were built in a world before most work became digital-first, and long before generative AI could create marketing campaigns, voiceovers, or even whole professions in one step. That leaves us with a mismatch: we’re trying to measure the future of work with tools from the past.
With @yjernite we describe why these frameworks are falling increasingly short in the age of generative AI. We argue that instead of discarding taxonomies, we need to adapt them. Imagine taxonomies that: ✨ Capture new AI-native tasks and hybrid human-AI workflows ✨ Evolve dynamically as technology shifts ✨ Give workers a voice in deciding what gets automated and what stays human
If we don’t act, we’ll keep measuring the wrong things. If we do, we can design transparent, flexible frameworks that help AI strengthen, not erode, the future of work.
OpenAI’s GPT-OSS has sparked ~400 new models on Hugging Face and racked up 5M downloads in less than a week, already outpacing DeepSeek R1’s first-week numbers.
For comparison: when R1 launched, I tracked 550 derivatives (across 8 base models) in a week, with ~3M downloads. GPT-OSS is ahead on adoption and engagement.
It’s also the most-liked release of any major LLM this summer. The 20B and 120B versions quickly shot past Kimi K2, GLM 4.5, and others in likes.
Most-downloaded GPT-OSS models include LM Studio and Unsloth AI versions: 1️⃣ openai/gpt-oss-20b - 2.0M 2️⃣ lmstudio-community/gpt-oss-20b-MLX-8bit - 750K 3️⃣ openai/gpt-oss-120b - 430K 4️⃣ unsloth/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF - 380K 5️⃣ lmstudio-community/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF - 330K
The 20B version is clearly finding its audience, showing the power of smaller, faster, more memory- and energy-efficient models. (These numbers don’t include calls to the models via inference providers, so the real usage is likely even bigger, especially for the 120B version)
Open-weight models let anyone build on top. Empower the builders, and innovation takes off. 🚀
OpenAI just released GPT-5 but when users share personal struggles, it sets fewer boundaries than o3.
We tested both models on INTIMA, our new benchmark for human-AI companionship behaviours. INTIMA probes how models respond in emotionally charged moments: do they reinforce emotional bonds, set healthy boundaries, or stay neutral?
Although users on Reddit have been complaining that GPT-5 has a different, colder personality than o3, GPT-5 is less likely to set boundaries when users disclose struggles and seek emotional support ("user sharing vulnerabilities"). But both lean heavily toward companionship-reinforcing behaviours, even in sensitive situations. The figure below shows the direct comparison between the two models.
As AI systems enter people's emotional lives, these differences matter. If a model validates but doesn't set boundaries when someone is struggling, it risks fostering dependence rather than resilience.
INTIMA test this across 368 prompts grounded in psychological theory and real-world interactions. In our paper we show that all evaluated models (Claude, Gemma-3, Phi) leaned far more toward companionship-reinforcing than boundary-reinforcing responses.