August 6 News.OpenAI Announcing the launch of twoOpen Source Model GPT-oss-120b and GPT-oss-20b are OpenAI's first open source language models since GPT-2 was released in 2020. Both models are available for free download on the Hugging Face online developer platform, and OpenAI says they have performed "at the forefront" of several benchmarks used to compare open-source models.
According to OpenAI, the Gpt-oss-120b model nearly matches the OpenAI o4-mini model in core inference benchmarks, while running efficiently on a single 80GB GPU. the Gpt-oss-20b model achieves similar results to the OpenAI o3-mini model in common benchmarks. The Gpt-oss-20b model achieves similar results to the OpenAI o3-mini model in common benchmarks and runs on edge devices with as little as 16GB of RAM, making it ideal for device-side applications, local inference, or rapid iteration without expensive infrastructure.
OpenAI says its open-source models can send complex queries to AI models in the cloud, meaning that if an open-source model can't do a certain task (such as image processing), developers can connect it to OpenAI's more powerful closed-source models.
OpenAI releases gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b under the Apache 2.0 license, which is considered one of the most permissive licenses. The license allows companies to commercialize OpenAI's open source models without having to pay OpenAI a fee or obtain a license. However, unlike the fully open-source offerings of AI labs like AI2, OpenAI says it will not make public the training data used to create its open-source models.
According to 1AI, although OpenAI open-sourced its AI models in the early days, in recent years the company has built a large business empire by adopting a proprietary, closed-source development approach and selling access to its AI models to enterprises and developers through APIs. However, in January of this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company was "on the wrong side of history" when it came to open source technology.
In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Altman said, "Since its founding in 2015, OpenAI's mission has been to ensure the development of generalized artificial intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of all humanity. To that end, we are excited that the world is building an open source AI platform based on American democratic values that is free and open to all, bringing broad benefits."