OpenAI responds to DeepSeek with two 'open' models

OpenAI is releasing a pair of open and freely available artificial intelligence models that can mimic the human process of reasoning, months after China's DeepSeek gained global attention with its own open AI software.

The two models, called GPT-oss-120b and GPT-oss-20b, will be available on AI software hosting platform Hugging Face and can produce text - but not images or videos-in response to user prompts, OpenAI said on Tuesday. These models can also carry out complex tasks like writing code and looking up information online on a user's behalf, the company said.

Crucially, the models are both open-weight systems, similar to Meta Platforms Inc.'s Llama. The term "weight" refers to the parameters in an AI model. OpenAI is disclosing the many numerical values the models picked up and were tweaked with during the training process, allowing developers to better customise them. However, OpenAI is not revealing the data used to train them, falling short of the definition for a truly open source AI model.


Despite its name, most of OpenAI's models are closed systems -the kind of software that's controlled by the developer, can't be modified by users, and includes less transparency about its technical underpinnings. Like many of its US rivals, OpenAI has guarded its training data and focused on charging more for its most powerful models to offset the immense cost of development.