After first saying that OpenAI may have been “on the wrong side of history” when it comes to open sourcing its technologies, CEO Sam Altman has announced that the artificial intelligence (AI) company will launch its first “open weight” language model since GPT-2 in the coming months. This, as the company battles perceptions that it might be ceding territory to rivals like Deepseek and Meta, who have launched some versions of open weight AI models.
“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time but other priorities took precedence. now it feels important to do,” Altman said in a post on X. The model will have “reasoning” capabilities along the lines of OpenAI’s o3-mini.
To be sure, Altman said that OpenAI would launch an open-weight model, and not an open source model – the former has less transparency compared to the latter.
Open source models provide full transparency, sharing source code, model architecture, training algorithms, and weights under a licence allowing free use, modification, and distribution. Ideally, training data is disclosed, but legal constraints often limit this. In contrast, open weight models only have the trained model weights, not the source code, training data, or full architecture details. This restricts transparency and customisation, as users can run the model but not fully modify or retrain it.
Why OpenAI is changing tack
After years of focusing on closed source technology, the shift in strategy at OpenAI was triggered by the emergence of China’s Deepseek, which showed the world that a language model, which was open sourced, could be made at a fraction of the cost it took some of its competitors. Meta has also found success through its open weight model, Llama, which has hit more than a billion downloads – even though developers have complained that its model’s licence terms could be commercially restrictive.
OpenAI currently offers its AI models through a chatbot and the cloud, unlike its rivals, whose models can be downloaded and modified by people.
In a recent Reddit Q&A, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI has been on the wrong side of history when it comes to open sourcing its technologies. “[I personally think we need to] figure out a different open source strategy,” Altman said. “Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it’s also not our current highest priority… We will produce better models, but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years.”
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According to a feedback form OpenAI published on its website, the company was inviting “developers, researchers, and [members of] the broader community” and included questions like, “What would you like to see in an open-weight model from OpenAI?” and “What open models have you used in the past?”
Timelines
In his X post, Altman said that before release, OpenAI will evaluate this model according to its preparedness framework, “like we would for any other model. and we will do extra work given that we know this model will be modified post-release”.
The company still has “some decisions to make” and is hosting developer events to gather feedback and later play with early prototypes. “We’ll start in (San Francisco) in a couple of weeks followed by sessions in Europe and APAC,” he added.
Steven Heidel, a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, reposted Altman’s announcement and added, “We’re releasing a model this year that you can run on your own hardware.”