OpenAI has announced plans to release its inaugural “open” language model since GPT-2 in the upcoming months. This announcement was made through a feedback form published on OpenAI’s website, targeted at “developers, researchers, and the broader community.” The form requests input with questions such as the desired features in an open-weight model from OpenAI and past open models used by respondents.
In a statement on its website, OpenAI expressed enthusiasm about collaborating with the community to gather feedback and enhance the model’s utility. Interested individuals are encouraged to indicate their willingness to participate in feedback sessions via the form provided.
The company intends to conduct developer events to collect feedback and showcase model prototypes in the near future. The first of these events will take place in San Francisco within a few weeks, followed by sessions planned in Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions.
OpenAI is experiencing increasing competition from companies like the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, which follow an “open” strategy by making their models available for community experimentation and potential commercialization. This approach has proven effective for some, such as Meta’s Llama AI models, which announced achieving over one billion downloads earlier this year.
In a recent interaction on Reddit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that the company may have previously underestimated the importance of open-sourcing technologies. He emphasized the need for a revised open-source strategy, although not everyone within OpenAI shares this perspective. Altman noted that while the company aims to develop superior models, it might not maintain the same lead it once had.
Altman further elaborated on OpenAI’s open model plans in a post on X, stating that the forthcoming model will feature reasoning capabilities similar to OpenAI’s o3-mini. He assured that the model would undergo evaluation through OpenAI’s preparedness framework prior to release, with additional considerations due to anticipated modifications post-release. OpenAI looks forward to witnessing how developers, large companies, and governments utilize the model when running it independently.
