On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company plans to release its new open-weight language model with reasoning capabilities in the coming months. This decision might have been driven by the impressive success of DeepSeek’s R1 model and the growing popularity of Meta Platforms, Inc.’s META Llama models.
What Happened: In a post shared on X, formerly Twitter, Altman revealed that the model would be the first of its kind since GPT-2 and would feature publicly accessible trained parameters or weights, allowing developers to fine-tune the model for specific tasks.
“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities took precedence,” Altman said, adding, “Now it feels important to do.”
Altman also said that the company plans to get feedback from developers through a series of global events.
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“We still have some decisions to make, so we are hosting developer events to gather feedback and later play with early prototypes,” he said. The first event will take place in San Francisco, followed by sessions in Europe and Asia-Pacific regions.
TL;DR: we are excited to release a powerful new open-weight language model with reasoning in the coming months, and we want to talk to devs about how to make it maximally useful: https://t.co/XKB4XxjREV
we are excited to make this a very, very good model!
__
we are planning to…
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 31, 2025
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OpenAI provides access to its AI via a chatbot and cloud-based services. In contrast, models like R1, Llama, and other open-weight alternatives can be freely downloaded and customized.
A model’s weights represent the internal values of a neural network, determined during training. Open-weight models offer a cost-effective solution and can be adapted for specialized applications, such as processing sensitive or confidential data, reported Wired.
After DeepSeek launched its model in January, Altman remarked that OpenAI was “on the wrong side of history” when it came to open models, hinting at a possible change in stance.
OpenAI might aim to demonstrate its ability to train the new model efficiently, especially since DeepSeek’s model was reportedly developed at a significantly lower cost than most large AI models.
“This is amazing news,” Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, a company known for hosting open AI models, told the publication. “With DeepSeek, everyone’s realizing the power of open weights.”
OpenAI is also transitioning to a for-profit company by the end of the year to secure a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank Group SFTBF SFTBY, which will support the development of future AI models.
This move comes after the company closed a $6.6 billion funding round in October.
Meanwhile, Meta has seen significant success with its AI model family, ‘Llama,’ which reached a milestone of 1 billion downloads. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted this achievement, underscoring the growing confidence in open-source AI models.
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