Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Another day, another large language model, but news that OpenAI has released its first open-weight models (gpt-oss) with Apache 2.0 licensing is a bigger deal than most. Finally, you can run a version of ChatGPT offline and for free, giving developers and us casual AI enthusiasts another powerful tool to try out.
As usual, OpenAI makes some pretty big claims about gpt-oss’s capabilities. The model can apparently outperform o4-mini and scores quite close to its o3 model — OpenAI’s cost-efficient and most powerful reasoning models, respectively. However, that gpt-oss model comes in at a colossal 120 billion parameters, requiring some serious computing kit to run. For you and me, though, there’s still a highly performant 20 billion parameter model available.
Can you now run ChatGPT offline and for free? Well, it depends.
In theory, the 20 billion parameter model will run on a modern laptop or PC, provided you have bountiful RAM and a powerful CPU or GPU to crunch the numbers. Qualcomm even claims it’s excited about bringing gpt-oss to its compute platforms — think PC rather than mobile. Still, this does beg the question: Is it possible to now run ChatGPT entirely offline and on-device, for free, on a laptop or even your smartphone? Well, it’s doable, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
What do you need to run gpt-oss?
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
Despite shrinking gpt-oss from 120 billion to 20 billion parameters for more general use, the official quantized model still weighs in at a hefty 12.2GB. OpenAI specifies VRAM requirements of 16GB for the 20B model and 80GB for the 120B model. You need a machine capable of holding the entire thing in memory at once to achieve reasonable performance, which puts you firmly into NVIDIA RTX 4080 territory for sufficient dedicated GPU memory — hardly something we all have access to.
For PCs with a smaller GPU VRAM, you’ll want 16GB of system RAM if you can split some of the model into GPU memory, and preferably a GPU capable of crunching FP4 precision data. For everything else, such as typical laptops and smartphones, 16GB is really cutting it fine as you need room for the OS and apps too. Based on my experience, 24GB RAM is required; my 7th Gen Surface Laptop, complete with a Snapdragon X processor and 16GB RAM, worked at an admittedly pretty decent 10 tokens per second, but barely held on even with every other application closed.
Despite it's smaller size, gpt-oss 20b still needs plenty of RAM and a powerful GPU to run smoothly.
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