This week, OpenAI said it is planning to release an open-source language model for the first time in years.
The creator of ChatGPT disclosed the news through a form requesting feedback for this strategy, saying it wants to hear from developers, researchers and the public to help it “make this model as useful as possible.”
The open-source model would be coming “in months,” according to OpenAI.
OpenAI said the last time it released an open-source model — meaning the model would be generally free to use, modify and distribute — was for the GPT-2 LLM in 2019. The startup is now at GPT-4.5.
OpenAI decided to make its models proprietary after Microsoft invested $1 billion in the startup, as part of a multi-year partnership to advance artificial intelligence (AI) model development.
Microsoft would end up investing more than $13 billion in OpenAI to date, and OpenAI’s models are exclusive to clients of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services. OpenAI also solely used Azure for its cloud computing needs, but this arrangement ended in January 2025.
In the past six years, OpenAI has kept its large language models closed, starting with GPT-3 until the latest GPT-4.5 and also for the o1 and o3 models.
OpenAI’s decision comes as open-source models like Meta’s Llama, Mistral’s LLM and DeepSeek have been gaining in popularity.
In March, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Threads that Llama has been downloaded 1 billion times. Llama was launched in 2023.
“Open sourcing AI is crucial to ensuring people everywhere have access to the benefits of AI,” Meta said in a blog post.
The social media giant said Spotify is one company that has used Llama to deliver customized recommendations of new songs, artists, podcasts or audiobooks to its listeners.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose inexpensive open-source models caught Silicon Valley’s attention in January, reportedly had to restrict API access because of soaring demand.
The three major cloud companies — AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — all have added DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model to their platforms for use by clients.
After DeepSeek’s popularity, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly said in late January that the startup would have to “figure out a different open-source strategy,” during a community forum with Reddit users.
Read more: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: Company Considering ‘Different Open-Source Strategy’
Chinese Tech Giants Launch AI Models Post-DeepSeek
Following the popularity of DeepSeek, Chinese tech giants have released updated versions of their own AI models — all in March.
Alibaba Cloud released its Qwenb 2.5-Omni-7B multimodal model that can process text, images, audio and video while generating real-time text and natural speech responses.
Alibaba said the model’s performance is “outstanding” and it is available as open source on Hugging Face and GitHub. The model is part of Alibaba’s Qwen family of foundation models.
Baidu released two new AI models: a natively multimodal one called Ernie 4.5 and a “deep thinking” reasoning model called Ernie X1.
Baidu said the models offer “advanced capabilities at a more accessible price point.” The company said Ernie 4.5 will be open-sourced this June but did not disclose plans for X1.
Tencent unveiled its Hunyuan T1 reasoning model that reportedly rivals DeepSeek in performance and price, according to the South China Morning Post.
AI startup Manus went viral for its AI agent that can do general tasks instead of one specific skill. It did not unveil a foundation model but rather uses the LLMs of others such as Anthropic’s Claude to power its agent.
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/
