OpenAI AMA: CEO Sam Altman and CPO Kevin Weil Answer Questions

In a wide-ranging Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Friday, OpenAI researchers, engineers, and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, answered questions from the community.

OpenAI’s Position in the AI Race

OpenAI finds itself in a precarious position, battling the perception that it’s ceding ground in the AI race to Chinese companies like DeepSeek, which OpenAI alleges might have stolen its IP. The ChatGPT maker has been trying to shore up its relationship with Washington and simultaneously pursue an ambitious data center project, while reportedly laying groundwork for one of the largest financing rounds in history.

Open Sourcing and Reasoning Models

Altman admitted that DeepSeek has lessened OpenAI’s lead in AI, and he said he believes OpenAI has been "on the wrong side of history" when it comes to open sourcing its technologies. While OpenAI has open sourced models in the past, the company has generally favored a proprietary, closed source development approach.

"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."

Open Sourcing Older Models

Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said that OpenAI is considering open sourcing older models that aren’t state-of-the-art anymore. "We’ll definitely think about doing more of this," he said, without going into greater detail.

Revealing Reasoning Models

Beyond prompting OpenAI to reconsider its release philosophy, Altman said that DeepSeek has pushed the company to potentially reveal more about how its so-called reasoning models, like the o3-mini model released today, show their "thought process." Currently, OpenAI’s models conceal their reasoning, a strategy intended to prevent competitors from scraping training data for their own models.

"We’re working on showing a bunch more than we show today — [showing the model thought process] will be very very soon," Weil added. "TBD on all — showing all chain of thought leads to competitive distillation, but we also know people (at least power users) want it, so we’ll find the right way to balance it."

ChatGPT Pricing

Altman and Weil attempted to dispel rumors that ChatGPT, the chatbot platform through which OpenAI launches many of its models, would increase in price in the future. Altman said that he’d like to make ChatGPT "cheaper" over time, if feasible.

Data Centers and Compute Power

In a somewhat related thread, Weil said that OpenAI continues to see evidence that more compute power leads to "better" and more performant models. That’s in large part what’s necessitating projects such as Stargate, OpenAI’s recently announced massive data center project.

Recursive Self-Improvement

Asked about recursive self-improvement that might be enabled by these powerful models, Altman said he thinks a "fast takeoff" is more plausible than he once believed. Recursive self-improvement is a process where an AI system could improve its own intelligence and capabilities without human input.

Destructive Weapons

One Reddit user asked whether OpenAI’s models, self-improving or not, would be used to develop destructive weapons — specifically nuclear weapons. This week, OpenAI announced a partnership with the U.S. government to give its models to the U.S. National Laboratories in part for nuclear defense research.

Technical Questions

The OpenAI team was asked several questions of a more technical nature, like when OpenAI’s next reasoning model, o3, will be released ("more than a few weeks, less than a few months," Altman said); when the company’s next flagship "non-reasoning" model, GPT-5, might land ("don’t have a timeline yet," said Altman); and when OpenAI might unveil a successor to DALL-E 3, the company’s image-generating model.

"Yes! We’re working on it," Weil said of a DALL-E 3 follow-up. "And I think it’s going to be worth the wait."