OpenAI introduced Tuesday the launch of two open-weight AI reasoning fashions with related capabilities to its o-series. Each are freely obtainable to obtain from the net developer platform Hugging Face, the corporate stated, describing the fashions as “state-of-the-art” when measured throughout a number of benchmarks for evaluating open fashions.
The fashions are available in two sizes: a bigger and extra succesful gpt-oss-120b mannequin that may run on a single Nvidia GPU, and a lighter-weight gpt-oss-20b mannequin that may run on a client laptop computer with 16GB of reminiscence.
The launch marks OpenAI’s first ‘open’ language mannequin since GPT-2, which was launched greater than 5 years in the past.
In a briefing, OpenAI stated its open fashions shall be able to sending advanced queries to AI fashions within the cloud, as TechCrunch beforehand reported. Meaning if OpenAI’s open mannequin shouldn’t be able to a sure activity, equivalent to processing a picture, builders can join the open mannequin to one of many firm’s extra succesful closed fashions.
Whereas OpenAI open sourced AI fashions in its early days, the corporate has usually favored a proprietary, closed supply growth method. The latter technique has helped OpenAI construct a big enterprise promoting entry to its AI fashions through an API to enterprises and builders.
Nevertheless, CEO Sam Altman stated in January he believes OpenAI has been “on the flawed facet of historical past” in relation to open sourcing its applied sciences. The corporate right this moment faces rising stress from Chinese language AI labs — together with DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen, and Moonshot AI — which have developed a number of of the world’s most succesful and standard open fashions. (Whereas Meta beforehand dominated the open AI house, the corporate’s Llama AI fashions have fallen behind within the final 12 months.)
In July, the Trump administration additionally urged U.S. AI builders to open supply extra know-how to advertise world adoption of AI aligned with American values.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
With the discharge of gpt-oss, OpenAI hopes to curry favor with builders and the Trump administration alike, each of which have watched the Chinese language AI labs rise to prominence within the open supply house.
“Going again to once we began in 2015, OpenAI’s mission is to make sure AGI that advantages all of humanity,” stated Altman in an announcement shared with TechCrunch. “To that finish, we’re excited for the world to be constructing on an open AI stack created in america, primarily based on democratic values, obtainable totally free to all and for huge profit.”
Picture Credit:Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty Photos
How the fashions carried out
OpenAI aimed to make its open mannequin a frontrunner amongst different open-weight AI fashions, and the corporate claims to have accomplished simply that.
On Codeforces (with instruments), a aggressive coding check, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b rating 2622 and 2516, respectively, outperforming DeepSeek’s R1 whereas underperforming o3 and o4-mini.
OpenAI’s open mannequin efficiency on codeforces.Picture Credit:OpenAI
On Humanity’s Final Examination (HLE), a difficult check of crowdsourced questions throughout a wide range of topics (with instruments), gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b rating 19% and 17.3%, respectively. Equally, this underperforms o3 however outperforms main open fashions from DeepSeek and Qwen.
OpenAI’s open mannequin efficiency on HLE.Picture Credit:OpenAI
Notably, OpenAI’s open fashions hallucinate considerably greater than its newest AI reasoning fashions, o3 and o4-mini.
Hallucinations have been getting extra extreme in OpenAI’s newest AI reasoning fashions, and the corporate beforehand stated it doesn’t fairly perceive why. In a white paper, OpenAI says that is “anticipated, as smaller fashions have much less world data than bigger frontier fashions and have a tendency to hallucinate extra.”
OpenAI discovered that gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b hallucinated in response to 49% and 53%, respectively, of questions on PersonQA, the corporate’s in-house benchmark for measuring the accuracy of a mannequin’s data about individuals. That’s greater than triple the hallucination price of OpenAI’s o1 mannequin, which scored 16%, and better than its o4-mini mannequin, which scored 36%.
Coaching the brand new fashions
OpenAI says its open fashions have been skilled with related processes to its proprietary fashions. The corporate says every open mannequin leverages mixture-of-experts (MoE) to faucet fewer parameters for any given query, making it run extra effectively. For gpt-oss-120b, which has 117 billion complete parameters, OpenAI says the mannequin solely prompts 5.1 billion parameters per token.
The corporate additionally says its open mannequin was skilled utilizing high-compute reinforcement studying (RL) — a post-training course of to show AI fashions proper from flawed in simulated environments utilizing massive clusters of Nvidia GPUs. This was additionally used to coach OpenAI’s o-series of fashions, and the open fashions have an analogous chain-of-thought course of wherein they take further time and computational sources to work by their solutions.
Because of the post-training course of, OpenAI says its open AI fashions excel at powering AI brokers and are able to calling instruments equivalent to net search or Python code execution as a part of its chain-of-thought course of. Nevertheless, OpenAI says its open fashions are text-only, which means they won’t be able to course of or generate pictures and audio like the corporate’s different fashions.
OpenAI is releasing gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b beneath the Apache 2.0 license, which is usually thought of some of the permissive. This license will permit enterprises to monetize OpenAI’s open fashions with out having to pay or acquire permission from the corporate.
Nevertheless, in contrast to absolutely open supply choices from AI labs like AI2, OpenAI says it is not going to be releasing the coaching knowledge used to create its open fashions. This choice is no surprise on condition that a number of energetic lawsuits in opposition to AI mannequin suppliers, together with OpenAI, have alleged that these corporations inappropriately skilled their AI fashions on copyrighted works.
OpenAI delayed the discharge of its open fashions a number of instances in latest months, partially to handle security considerations. Past the corporate’s typical security insurance policies, OpenAI says in a white paper that it additionally investigated whether or not dangerous actors may fine-tune its gpt-oss fashions to be extra useful in cyberattacks or the creation of organic or chemical weapons.
After testing from OpenAI and third-party evaluators, the corporate says gpt-oss could marginally improve organic capabilities. Nevertheless, it didn’t discover proof that these open fashions may attain its “excessive functionality” threshold for hazard in these domains, even after fine-tuning.
Whereas OpenAI’s mannequin seems to be state-of-the-art amongst open fashions, builders are eagerly awaiting the discharge of DeepSeek R2, its subsequent AI reasoning mannequin, in addition to a brand new open mannequin from Meta’s Superintelligence Lab.
