OpenAI announced Tuesday the launch of two open-weight AI reasoning models with similar capabilities to its o-series. Both are freely available to download from the online developer platform, Hugging Face, the company said, describing the models as “state-of-the-art” when measured across several benchmarks for comparing open models.
The models come in two sizes: a larger and more capable gpt-oss-120b model that can run on a single Nvidia GPU, and a lighter-weight gpt-oss-20b model that can run on a consumer laptop with 16GB of memory.
The launch marks OpenAI’s first ‘open’ language model since GPT-2, which was released more than five years ago.
In a briefing, OpenAI said its open models will be capable of sending complex queries to AI models in the cloud, as TechCrunch previously reported. That means if OpenAI’s open model is not capable of a certain task, such as processing an image, developers can connect the open model to one of the company’s more capable closed models.
While OpenAI open-sourced AI models in its early days, the company has generally favored a proprietary, closed-source development approach. The latter strategy has helped OpenAI build a large business selling access to its AI models via an API to enterprises and developers.
However, CEO Sam Altman said in January he believes OpenAI has been “on the wrong side of history” when it comes to open sourcing its technologies. The company today faces growing pressure from Chinese AI labs — including DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen, and Moonshot AI —which have developed several of the world’s most capable and popular open models. (While Meta previously dominated the open AI space, the company’s Llama AI models have fallen behind in the last year.)
In July, the Trump Administration also urged U.S. AI developers to open source more technology to promote global adoption of AI aligned with American values.
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With the release of gpt-oss, OpenAI hopes to curry favor with developers and the Trump Administration alike, both of which have watched the Chinese AI labs rise to prominence in the open source space.
“Going back to when we started in 2015, OpenAI’s mission is to ensure AGI that benefits all of humanity,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a statement shared with TechCrunch. “To that end, we are excited for the world to be building on an open AI stack created in the United States, based on democratic values, available for free to all and for wide benefit.”
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