OpenAI has announced plans to release its first open language model since GPT-2 “in the coming months,” according to a feedback form published on its website.
The form, which invites input from developers, researchers, and the broader community, asks questions such as “What features would you like to see in an open-weight model from OpenAI?” and “What open models have you used in the past?” The goal is to gather feedback to make the model as useful as possible.
“We are excited to collaborate with the community to gather inputs and make this model as useful as possible,” OpenAI stated 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 demo prototypes of the model. The first event will take place in San Francisco, followed by sessions in Europe and Asia-Pacific regions.
OpenAI is set to release a model this year that can be run on personal hardware https://t.co/0ji9oezNyr
— Steven Heidel (@stevenheidel) March 31, 2025
OpenAI is facing growing pressure from rivals such as Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, which have adopted an open approach to launching models. In contrast to OpenAI’s strategy, these open competitors make their models available for experimentation and commercialization.
This strategy has proven successful for some companies. Meta, which has invested heavily in its Llama family of open AI models, announced earlier in March that Llama had racked up over 1 billion downloads. Meanwhile, DeepSeek has quickly gained a large user base and attracted the attention of investors.
In a recent Reddit Q&A, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed his belief that the company has been on the wrong side of history regarding open-sourcing its technologies.
“[I personally think we need to] develop 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, 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, stating that the upcoming open model will have “reasoning” capabilities similar to 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.
