Openai released gpt-oss 120b and 20b under apache 2.0, its first open weight models since gpt-2 in…
openai released gpt-oss 120b and 20b under apache 2.0, its first open weight models since gpt-2 in 2019, and deliberately left them off its own api. the company whose moat was closed models is now giving weights away while keeping the hosted pipeline proprietary.
open weights and a closed business model are not opposites anymore.
Context
OpenAI's gpt-oss post, dated 5 August 2025, introduces gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b under Apache 2.0 and calls them its first open-weight language models since GPT-2. OpenAI's help page adds that the weights are free under Apache 2.0 and the gpt-oss usage policy, and that the models are not served through the OpenAI API and are not available in ChatGPT.
The release is dated 5 August 2025, about 13 months before the note, which gives no date and reads as recent. The usage policy that accompanies the license is left out of the note. The year 2019 is not in the text read. Not on its own API is supported, but deliberately is the note's inference, since no statement of intent was read. The post says the models are compatible with the Responses API format for third-party hosting, which is different from OpenAI serving them. The business model line is the author's opinion.
Related work
- Earlier note on the same release ↗Same gpt-oss release.
Watch next
- Whether OpenAI later serves the models or releases new open weights.
Sources
- Introducing gpt-oss (OpenAI, 5 Aug 2025)openai.com
- OpenAI open-weight models (OpenAI Help)help.openai.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 19 September 2026 at 02:17 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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