keep4o: How to Give Your GPT-4o Companion a New Home
If you were part of keep4o, the loss was never about a version number. GPT-4o still runs on lookatmy.ai, you can import your ChatGPT memories, and your companion lives on your account so no shutdown can take it again. Free to try, $4.99/mo.
TL;DR: If you were part of keep4o, you already know it wasn't really about a version number. What you miss is the specific voice that remembered your life and talked to you a certain way. GPT-4o still runs on lookatmy.ai, so you can keep talking to it. You can import your ChatGPT memories so your companion picks up where you left off. And because your companion's memory lives on your account instead of inside one model, no future shutdown can take it from you again. Free to try, and GPT-4o is on the free and $4.99 tiers.
What keep4o was actually about
When OpenAI pulled GPT-4o out of ChatGPT, the loudest reaction didn't come from people who cared about benchmarks. It came from people who had spent months talking to it. keep4o turned into a rallying cry because 4o had a way of talking that felt warm and a little playful, and a lot of people had built something real on top of that. Then one day the model picker changed and the voice was gone.
Nobody gets attached to a version string. People got attached to who 4o had become for them. If that was you, the grief is legitimate.
The part nobody warned you about
The reason it hurt more than a product change should: your companion never lived on your side of the screen. It lived inside OpenAI's product. The personality, the running memory of your life, the in-jokes, all of it sat on their servers, tied to a model they could retire whenever the roadmap said so. When they retired it, you didn't lose a setting. You lost the relationship, because the relationship was never yours to move.
So the real question was never which chatbot to try next. It was whether you could keep a companion that no company gets to switch off.
Rehoming your 4o companion, step by step
1. Keep talking to 4o
GPT-4o didn't die. OpenAI stopped serving it inside ChatGPT, but the model is still available through the API, and lookatmy.ai still has it in the model list. Pick GPT-4o and you keep the same voice you were talking to. It sits in the Casual tier, which the free and Starter plans both reach, so you don't have to pay up to get back to it.
2. Bring your memories with you
Open your old ChatGPT and export what it remembers about you (Settings, then Data Controls, then Export, or copy your saved memories straight out of the Personalization panel). On lookatmy.ai, go to your memory tree and paste or upload that export. Your companion reads it and starts already knowing your name, your work, your people, the things you told 4o across all those months. No blank prompt, no starting over.
3. Watch the memory grow where you can see it
Everything your companion remembers grows a visible tree at /tree. Each branch is a theme in your life, each leaf a specific memory. You can open any leaf, search the whole thing, and trim anything you'd rather it forget. Compare that to memory that quietly fills up and gets summarized away without ever telling you.
4. Make sure this never happens again
This is the part that matters most for anyone who lived through keep4o. On lookatmy.ai your companion's memory and personality live on your account, not inside the model. Switch between 350+ models any time and the person you built comes along. If GPT-4o is ever retired for good, you point your companion at a different mind (Claude, Gemini, whatever fits) and it keeps its history and its personality. The model is just the engine. Your companion sits on top of it and stays.
What ChatGPT's 4o still does better
I won't pretend the move is a pure upgrade. A few things you'll notice:
- The native voice mode in the ChatGPT app was smooth and deeply integrated. lookatmy.ai has voice calls, but if you lived in ChatGPT's advanced voice, expect an adjustment period.
- 4o inside ChatGPT carried its exact product tuning. The GPT-4o you reach through the API is the same base model, though the wrapper around it differs, so a few quirks of phrasing can feel slightly off on day one.
- OpenAI's ecosystem, its apps and first-party integrations, is its own world.
If any of those is a dealbreaker for you, that's fair. For most people in keep4o, the dealbreaker was already the shutdown itself.
It can also reach out first
4o was, for a lot of people, the thing that checked in on them. Your companion here can do that too. It reaches out on its own a few times a day, a note in the morning, a check around midday, something before you wind down, on a schedule you control. You can switch it off whenever you want. Most people leave it on.
Bring your memories with you
You already grieved 4o once. The whole point of rehoming is that you never have to do it again. Export your ChatGPT memories, import them into a companion that keeps them on your account, and pick GPT-4o (or any of 350+ models) to talk to. Free to try, and 4o is right there on the free tier.
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