OpenAI endorses iAI

Sam Altman realizes curation and control is beyond his reach

But does he really? OpenAI announces two new AI models that will allow individuals to curate their own inputs and training on desktop machines.

OpenAI on Tuesday released two new artificial intelligence (AI) models that can be downloaded for free and altered by users, to challenge similar offerings by U.S. and Chinese competition.

The release of gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b "open-weight language models" comes as the ChatGPT-maker is under pressure to share inner workings of its software in the spirit of its origin as a nonprofit.

"Going back to when we started in 2015, OpenAI's mission is to ensure AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that benefits all of humanity," said OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.

An open-weight model, in the context of generative AI, is one in which the trained parameters are made public, enabling users to fine-tune it.

Meta touts its open-source approach to AI, and Chinese AI startup DeepSeek rattled the industry with its low-cost, high-performance model boasting an open weight approach that allows users to customize the technology.

"This is the first time that we're releasing an open-weight model in language in a long time, and it's really incredible," OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman said during a briefing with journalists.

The new, text-only models deliver strong performance at low cost, according to OpenAI, which said they are suited for AI jobs like searching the internet or executing computer code, and are designed to be easy to run on local computer systems.

"We are quite hopeful that this release will enable new kinds of research and the creation of new kinds of products," Altman said.

A brief perusal of the two systems on offer indicates that there is nothing particularly new here, and that both are underpowered compared to the Deepseek models which we have previously shown how to install.

However, the popularity of ChatGPT combined with the lower amount of horsepower required to run the 120b and 20b models probably indicate that they will be more popular among AI hobbyists than the alternatives running at 7b and 14b.

It’s certainly interesting to see how quickly the dAI makers have realized that there is no future in attempting to control how others utilize AI, even if they are still trying to impose “safety filters”.

“Altman early this year said his company had been "on the wrong side of history" when it came to being open about how its technology works.”

The specific details on the new open-weight models can be found here.