OpenAI to release its first ‘open’ language model since GPT-2 in 2019

OpenAI is set to launch an “open” version of its language model this year, allowing developers to run the model on their own hardware.

In an update posted to X on March 31, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the artificial intelligence firm would release the powerful “new open-weight language model with reasoning” in the coming months but first wanted to gather feedback about “how to make it maximally useful.”

“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities have taken precedence. Now it feels important to do,” he said, adding it was the first “open-weight” model since GPT-2 in 2019.

Adding that: “We still have some decisions to make, so we are hosting developer events to gather feedback and later play with early prototypes.”

Source: Sam Altman

An open-weight language model is publicly available for anyone to use, download, modify or deploy for their own purposes. It’s not as open as an open-source model, but it would be a change from GPT-3 and GPT-4, which were fully closed.

Altman said developer events for GPT-2 will start in San Francisco, California — where OpenAI is headquartered — in the next few weeks, followed by sessions in Europe and the Asia–Pacific region, according to Altman.

Source: Steven Heidel

“We’re excited to see what developers build and how large companies and governments use it where they prefer to run a model themselves,” Altman said.

“We will do extra work given that we know this model will be modified post-release.”

OpenAI’s open-weight language model GPT-2 was partially released in February 2019, followed by a full release in November of the same year.

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Altman also said on Feb. 12 his firm wants to ship GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 in the coming weeks or months.

The AI arms race has been heating up with the launch of rival DeepSeek, which functions similarly to ChatGPT but was reportedly created at a fraction of the cost and time.

Alibaba Group launched its new open-source AI model for cost-effective AI agents on March 26, while Google introduced Gemini 2.5, its latest experimental artificial intelligence model, on March 25.

Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a March 19 Threads post that the firm’s AI model family, Llama, released in February 2023, had hit 1 billion downloads.

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