Openai released gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b under apache 2.0 — its first open weights since gpt-2,…
openai released gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b under apache 2.0 — its first open weights since gpt-2, closing a five-year closed era. the same company selling agentic subscriptions just gave away its flagship-class models.
the moat was never the weights.
Context
OpenAI's gpt-oss post, dated 5 August 2025, introduces gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b as open-weight models under Apache 2.0. It says the 120b is near parity with o4-mini on core reasoning benchmarks and runs on a single 80 GB GPU, and the 20b is similar to o3-mini and needs 16 GB of memory. OpenAI's open models page also lists gpt-oss-safeguard.
The first-party release is 5 August 2025, a year before the note, which gives no date. OpenAI's post calls these its first open-weight language models since GPT-2, which supports that part; a five-year closed era and the year 2019 are not in the OpenAI text read, and the elapsed time is the author's claim. OpenAI compares the models with o4-mini and o3-mini, not its flagships, so flagship-class is not supported.
Related work
- OpenAI open models ↗First-party.
Watch next
- Later OpenAI open-weight releases.
Sources
- Introducing gpt-oss (OpenAI, 5 Aug 2025)openai.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 18 September 2026 at 07:52 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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