OpenAI, the company behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT, is building a new AI model. The model will be an "open-weights" language model with reasoning, according to CEO Sam Altman who tweeted about the development on Monday.
An "open-weights" AI model is a kind of middle ground between open- and closed-source approaches. Weights are how AI models learn and make connections -- certain characteristics or connections are given more weight in an effort to reinforce specific information. An open-weights model means that its weights are publicly available, as the Federal Trade Commission puts it. That means that users would be able to see these weights and change them without retraining the model on new data.
Open-weights models are usually cheaper for companies to use and allows them to customize the models. For example, a business could upload its internal documents to an existing open-weights model to incorporate that information in its results without having to build the whole thing from scratch.
But open-weights models are not the same thing as open-source models. Like the name implies, an open-source model lets you see what it's made of, the source code, sometimes in addition to how it's trained and weighted. In an open-weights model, you can see how the model makes connections but not necessarily its underlying code or training content. It's all about the degree of openness. Given OpenAI's track record of not disclosing what it uses to train ChatGPT, the new open-weight model is likely to give folks a glimpse behind the curtain, but not much else.
AI companies are in a heated race as they each develop a variety of models for different uses. OpenAI's new model is primed to be a competitor to Meta's Llama models, which are open-source. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that open-source is the correct path forward for AI development. The new model also comes as Chinese AIs like DeepSeek fight for the top spot. DeepSeek's newest V3 model is reportedly leading the pack, and it's also an open-weights model. Open-weights and open-source models could threaten OpenAI's subscription models by providing businesses with cheaper, more customized AI tools, so the company appears to be making moves to catch up to its competition.
It's unclear exactly when the new model will be released. For now, OpenAI is inviting developers to submit feedback about what would make the model the most useful for them. You can contribute that feedback in this form on OpenAI's website.
For more, check out the Studio Ghibli-esque AI images made with ChatGPT's new image generator and our full review of the chatbot.