OpenAI releases open-weight AI models optimised for laptops

OpenAI announced on Tuesday the launch of two innovative open-weight language models designed for advanced reasoning tasks, specifically optimized to operate on laptops. These models offer performance capabilities that rival some of their smaller proprietary counterparts. An open-weight model allows developers to access its trained parameters, enabling them to analyze and adapt the model for various specific applications without needing the original training data. Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, emphasized the uniqueness of these models, stating that users can deploy them locally on their own infrastructure, maintaining control over their applications and data. It is important to distinguish open-weight models from open-source models, which provide full access to the source code, training datasets, and methodologies. The competition within the landscape of open-weight and open-source AI models has intensified this year. Notably, while Meta's Llama models were once seen as the leading options, their position has shifted with the introduction of China's DeepSeek's economical and powerful reasoning model, amidst Meta's challenges in rolling out Llama 4. The newly released OpenAI models mark the company's first foray into open models since the debut of GPT-2 in 2019. The larger model, gpt-oss-120b, can be run on a single GPU, while the smaller gpt-oss-20b is compact enough for personal computers. OpenAI claims that these models deliver performance comparable to their proprietary models, o3-mini and o4-mini, excelling particularly in areas such as coding, competitive mathematics, and health-related inquiries. These models were trained on a text-only dataset, focusing not only on general knowledge but also emphasizing science, mathematics, and coding skills. However, OpenAI has not provided benchmarks to compare these open-weight models against competitors like DeepSeek-R1. Currently, OpenAI, valued at $300 billion and backed by Microsoft, is in the process of raising up to $40 billion in a new funding round led by Softbank Group.