OpenAI returns to its open-source roots with new open-weight AI models, and it's a big deal

We all know AI relies on open-source software, but most of the big AI companies avoid opening their code or their large language model (LLM) weights. Today, things have changed. OpenAI, the artificial intelligence titan behind ChatGPT, announced a landmark return to its open-source origins. 

The company unveiled two new open-weight language models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, marking its first public release of freely available AI model weights since GPT-2 in 2019, long before the AI hype took over the tech world.

Also: OpenAI could launch GPT-5 any minute now - what to expect

Open-weight models enable anyone to download, examine, run, or fine-tune the LLM, and they eliminate the need to rely on remote cloud APIs or expose in-house sensitive data to external services. 

OpenAI has not, however, released the training data used for these models because of legal and safety concerns. That will not ...