Vibe Check: OpenAI Drops Two New Open-weight Models
Dan Shipper / Vibe Check
Length6m
About this audiobook
Was this newsletter forwarded to you?Sign upto get it in your inbox.If your life’s dream is to be able tovibe codeon a deserted island, or in a cabin in the woods during a power outage, or on a long-haul flight with no WiFi, rejoice! Dreams do come true.Today, OpenAI is releasing its first open-weight models since GPT-2 in 2019:gpt-oss-120bandgpt-oss-20b. Because they’reopen-weight, you can run them yourself, on your laptop or on your own cloud, instead of in OpenAI’s cloud through its API. So you can take them with you anywhere—to a cabin in the woods—and use them at any time—at 40,000 feet with no WiFi.The20bis the small version that’s tiny enough for you to run on a MacBook. It’s about as powerful for coding and other reasoning tasks aso3-mini.Let me repeat: You can now run an o3-mini-level model on a MacBook.The120bis the more powerful model designed to run on a single GPU in your private cloud. According to OpenAI’s internal benchmarks, it matches or exceedso4-minion reasoning tasks like competition coding, general problem solving, and tool calling.Usually I like to be hands-on withvibe checks, but unfortunately I couldn’t try these models before their release. However, based on OpenAI’s internal benchmarks, both of them appear to push the current frontier for other open models of their size, likeMeta’s Llamaand Alibaba’s Qwen. AsGreg Brockman, OpenAI cofounder and president, said during a call with journalists yesterday, “The team cooked with this one.”Both models are being released today for free under an Apache 2.0 open-source software license, so you can use, modify, or sell them yourself.The big questions are: What are these models useful for? And why? What’s the strategy?What are these models useful for?I can think of a few ways right off the bat where we’re going to start experimenting with these models internally (aside from vibe coding at 40,000 feet)...Become apaid subscriber to Everyto unlock this piece and learn about:OpenAI's strategic play for local computingSecurity benefits for regulated industriesThe business logic of giving away modelsUpgrade to paidClick hereto read the full postWant the full text of all articles in RSS?Become a subscriber, orlearn more.
