OpenAI says that it intends to release its first “open” language model since GPT‑2 “in the coming months.”
That’s according to a feedback form the company published on its website Monday. The form, which OpenAI is inviting “developers, researchers, and [members of] the broader community” to fill out, includes 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?”
“We’re excited to collaborate with developers, researchers, and the broader community to gather inputs and make this model as useful as possible,” OpenAI wrote on its website. “If you’re interested in joining a feedback session with the OpenAI team, please let us know [in the form] below.”
OpenAI plans to host developer events to gather feedback and, in the future, demo prototypes of the model. The first developer event will take place in San Francisco within a few weeks, followed by sessions in Europe and Asia-Pacific regions.
OpenAI is facing increasing pressure from rivals such as Chinese AI lab DeepSeek that have adopted an “open” approach to launching models. In contrast to OpenAI’s strategy, these “open” competitors make their models available to the AI community for experimentation and, in some cases, commercialization.
It has proven to be a wildly successful strategy for some outfits. Meta, which has invested heavily in its Llama family of open AI models, said earlier in March that Llama had racked up over 1 billion downloads. Meanwhile, DeepSeek has quickly amassed a large worldwide user base and attracted the attention of domestic investors.
In a recent Reddit Q&A, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he thinks 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 [going forward], but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years.”
Altman expanded on OpenAI’s open model plans in a post on X on Monday afternoon, saying that OpenAI’s upcoming open model will have “reasoning” capabilities along the lines of OpenAI’s o3-mini.
“[B]efore release, we will evaluate this model according [to] our preparedness framework, like we would for any other model,” Altman said. “[A]nd we will do extra work given that we know this model will be modified post-release […] [W]e’re excited to see what developers build and how large companies and governments use it where they prefer to run a model themselves.”
Excerpts of a forthcoming book by Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey published over the weekend allege that Altman misled OpenAI executives about model safety reviews prior to his brief ouster in November 2023.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/
