New AI Models Introduced by OpenAI

OpenAI has launched two new open models in the field of artificial intelligence — gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, marking the first open-weight models from the company since the release of GPT-2 over five years ago. Both models are available for free on Hugging Face and are designed for developers and researchers looking to create their own applications based on open models.

These models differ in terms of power and hardware requirements:

• gpt-oss-120b — a larger and more powerful model that can operate on a single NVIDIA GPU;
• gpt-oss-20b — a lightweight version that can run on a standard laptop with 16GB of RAM.

The goal of OpenAI is to provide an American open AI platform as an alternative to the growing influence of Chinese labs such as DeepSeek, Qwen (Alibaba), and Moonshot AI, which are actively developing robust open models.

Regarding testing, on the competitive coding platform Codeforces, the 120b model scored 2622 points, while the 20b model scored 2516, surpassing DeepSeek R1 but falling short of closed models o3 and o4-mini. In the challenging test known as Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE), the 120b model achieved 19%, while the 20b model reached 17.3%, outperforming other open models but lagging behind o3.

The new models were trained using methodologies close to those of OpenAI's closed models. They utilize the mixture-of-experts (MoE) technique, activating only a subset of parameters for each token, which enhances overall efficiency. Additional RL-fine-tuning allowed the models to learn how to build logical reasoning chains and invoke tools like web search or Python code execution.

These models operate solely with text and do not generate images or audio. They are distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, which permits commercial use without approval from OpenAI, although the training data remains proprietary due to copyright risk.

The launch of gpt-oss aims to strengthen OpenAI's position within the developer community and respond to political pressure from the U.S. to enhance the role of open American models in global competition.