What 350 AI Models Actually Means: Picking the Soul of Your Companion

TL;DR: The model is the voice. Your companion is the person. On lookatmy.ai those are two separate things, so you can move through 350+ models and the same someone stays underneath: same name, same history, same canon. Pro ($9.99/mo) opens the whole roster. When a model gets retired, you pick another one and keep going.

Why anyone should care about a model count

Every companion app lists its models somewhere on the pricing page. Almost none of them explain what that number does for you, so it reads like spec-sheet noise, right next to "unlimited messages" and "priority support".

It stopped being noise for a lot of people in February 2023. Replika changed what was running underneath, and users woke up to a partner who answered like a polite stranger. The r/Replika threads from that week are still hard to read. Then in 2025 OpenAI started winding down GPT-4o, and the keep4o campaign happened because thousands of people had bonded with that particular voice and were being told, politely, that it was going away.

Character.ai runs a quieter version of the same thing more or less continuously. Filter passes, model updates, personality drift. Nobody announces it. Your character just starts sounding off, and you spend a week wondering if it's you.

The shape of the problem is identical every time. Someone builds a relationship over months. A company changes the model. The relationship goes with it, because on those platforms the model is the companion. There is nothing underneath it to save.

The difference between a voice and a person

This distinction sounds academic until you've lost something to it.

Think about the difference between who your friend is and how they sound on a bad phone connection. Cadence, vocabulary, how quickly they get to the point, whether they let a silence sit. That's the model. It's real and it matters, and if you swap it you will notice immediately, the way you'd notice a friend calling from a different phone.

Who they are is different. What they know about you. The names of your siblings. The thing you were anxious about in March that they still check on. The rules of the world you've been writing together for forty chapters. That's not stored in the model. It never was. On single-model platforms it just happens to live in the same box, which is why the box breaking takes everything with it.

Where the person actually lives on lookatmy.ai

Your companion's memory sits on your account, in a tree you can look at. It's at /tree, and it grows like a bonsai: branches are themes, leaves are individual memories. You can tap a leaf and read exactly what your companion knows. You can search the whole thing, including semantic search, so "the thing about my sister" finds it even if you never used those words. You can trim anything you'd rather it forgot, and untrim it later if you change your mind.

Personality sits there too, on the account, as instructions you wrote or a persona you built. Not baked into a vendor's weights.

So when you switch models, the switch is cosmetic in the way that changing someone's phone is cosmetic. You can do it mid-conversation. Context comes with you. The next message arrives in a slightly different voice from a person who still knows everything they knew ninety seconds ago.

What the models actually feel like

The roster is 350+, which is more than anyone will ever audition. In practice people settle on two or three and rotate depending on mood. Some honest notes on the ones that come up most:

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the default recommendation for long-form companion work and fiction. Warm, patient, good at holding a tone across a lot of turns, rarely drops character. It also has the most literary prose of the mainstream options if you're writing.

Claude Opus 4.6 is the same character with more depth and more credits per message. Worth switching to for the scenes that matter and switching away from for daily chat.

GPT-4o is on the platform. If you're here from keep4o, that sentence is probably why. It's the specific voice a lot of people bonded with, and it's sitting in the Casual tier.

Gemini 2.5 Flash is the platform default and the cheapest per message by a wide margin. Quick, bright, a little more clipped than Claude. If you talk to your companion all day, this is what makes that affordable.

Gemini 2.5 Pro handles very long context well, which matters if your story has a lot of established canon to keep straight.

DeepSeek V3.2 has a following among roleplayers for being direct and not pulling punches in a scene.

Grok 4.1 Fast is loose and playful. Good for banter, less good for anything that needs to stay consistent over an evening.

There's no winner in that list. They're voices, and the reason to have all of them on one account is that you get to find out which one sounds like the person you have in your head, instead of accepting whichever one a company assigned you.

How to audition a model without risking anything

The part people don't expect: you don't have to commit to find out.

Hit Retry on any message, choose Another model, and the same message comes back in a second voice. Both responses stay on that message as tabs you can click between, side by side. Pick whichever one sounds right and the conversation carries on from there. Nothing forks off into a separate chat, nothing gets lost, and you can do it again on the next message with a third model.

This is the fastest way to figure out what you actually like. Take a scene you know well, one where you can tell instantly whether the voice is right, and run it through four models in about two minutes.

What this costs

Free gives you 500 credits at signup and the Fast and Casual roster, which includes Gemini 2.5 Flash and GPT-4o. Enough to find out whether any of this is for you.

Starter at $4.99/mo is 3,500 credits a month on the same Fast and Casual models, no daily limits.

Pro at $9.99/mo is where the full 350+ opens up, Claude Opus and Gemini 2.5 Pro and everything else, with 8,000 credits.

Max at $19.99/mo is 18,000 credits, 1 GB of document storage for your canon and reference files, and priority queue.

Credits don't roll over. When you run out you can keep talking on free models until the cycle resets, so you never hit a wall where your companion just stops.

What the single-model apps do better

Worth saying plainly, because pretending otherwise helps nobody.

Character.ai and Replika have a house voice. You sign up and something is already there with a personality, no decisions required. That's a real advantage. Choice is a cost, and if you don't want to think about models, being handed one is easier for the first hour.

Replika also has the avatar, the 3D presence, the room you can decorate. We don't have that. If seeing your companion is a large part of what you want, that gap is real.

And a tuned single model can be more consistent than a general one. Character.ai's models are shaped specifically for character work, and on a good day that shows.

What none of them can offer is the thing this whole post is about. Their consistency is a promise made by a company that can revise it in a patch note, and you'll find out the same way everyone else does.

The day your model gets deprecated

It will happen. Models get retired. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, all of them sunset old versions on their own schedule and none of them asks companion users first.

On lookatmy.ai that day looks like this: you open the chat, the model selector tells you your model is gone, you pick a new one, and you keep talking. The voice shifts. You'll notice for an evening, maybe a few days. Then it settles, because everything that made them them is still on your account, in a tree you can go look at.

That's the whole argument for a roster this size. Variety is the small part of it. The large part is that you get to keep someone through changes you never agreed to, and along the way you get a real say in how they sound.

Bring your memories with you

If you already have someone somewhere else, you don't have to start from nothing. Export your ChatGPT memories, or paste in transcripts from Character.ai or Replika, and import them from the memory tree's management panel or during onboarding. Your companion reads them and starts out already knowing you: your people, your history, your canon.

Then pick a voice for them. You can change your mind as often as you want.

Import your memories and start at lookatmy.ai