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Personally, I would start neither a romantic relationship or therapy with an LLM which is not running on hardware I control.
As the saying goes, if you are not paying (enough) for it, you are not the customer, you are the product.
LLMs are still (I think) in the gold-rush stage where venture capital can substitute for balancing the budget, and it is more important for firms to build a userbase than it is to adequately monetarize that user base. You don't want to be the firm which ran a sustainably-priced service and thus got very little in the way of user interactions when other firms will burn through money just to gain that experience.
So your chats are what you are really paying to the AI company. They will be relentlessly mined to train the next model, but probably also be sold, get stolen or offered to the NYT as part of a settlement.
On the opposite side, I think that for romantic or therapy roles having the latest and greatest model is probably overkill. Unless you are extremely sapiosexual, you are unlikely to care how many of the IOC problems your virtual partner can solve. Assuming that the LLM has read all the relevant books on therapy during training, I think being a good therapist is more about Wisdom than Intelligence. Ideally you would want separate RLHF for that role, though. Virtual assistants are probably a bit too much yes-men. WIS is required both to know when your patient is lying to themselves, and also what the best speed to clear up the lies is. I honestly do not know if recent LLMs have made progress with that, and the Open Weight models might serve as a good-enough basis to run on your gaming rig. Only seeing the text inputs of the patient instead of a video feed might be limiting, though.
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