Sam Altman Says OpenAI Has Been on “The Wrong Side of History” Regarding Open Source

On Friday, six of the top leaders at OpenAI held an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) session on the r/OpenAI subreddit. One of the commenters was CEO Sam Altman, who revealed his personal feelings on his company’s approach to open source AI models. Altman said he thinks OpenAI should consider open source models, but also admitted that not everyone at the company agrees with him.

Altman thinks OpenAI should reconsider open source

While OpenAI has released open source AI models in the past, recently the company has only released closed source models, which keeps the data and development process proprietary. During the AMA, Reddit user u/lolzinventor wondered if the company would ever return to its earlier stance, asking, “Would you consider releasing some model weights, and publishing some research?”

Altman replied: “yes, we are discussing. i personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy; not everyone at openai shares this view, and it’s also not our current highest priority.”

Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, also briefly chimed in on the discussion. He wrote, “We have done this in the past with previous models, and are def considering doing more of it. No final decisions yet though!” However, he did not offer additional details or clarification on when OpenAI might release an open source AI tool.

OpenAI competitor DeepSeek finds success with open source model

Altman’s reconsideration of open source models is likely motivated by the recent success of DeepSeek, an open source competitor to OpenAI. DeepSeek became the no. 1 most downloaded free app last week when it made its debut in the U.S., bumping OpenAI from the top slot. The Chinese-created generative AI model also dominated app downloads in various countries all over the globe.

In contrast with OpenAI,  which follows a closed model, DeepSeek’s AI model discloses its full chain of reasoning in an open source model. Altman called DeepSeek’s R1 model “impressive” during a short thread on X.com early last week.

He also referenced R1 during the Reddit AMA session in response to a user asking if OpenAI would ever release the models’ reasoning tokens. “we are gonna show a much more helpful and detailed version of this, soon. credit to r1 for updating us,” Altman said.
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