To cap off a day of product releases, OpenAI researchers, engineers, and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, answered questions in a wide-ranging Reddit AMA on Friday.
OpenAI finds itself in a bit of a precarious position. It’s battling the perception that it’s ceding ground in the AI race to Chinese companies like DeepSeek, which OpenAI alleges might’ve stolen its IP. The ChatGPT maker has been trying to shore up its relationship with Washington and simultaneously pursue an ambitious data center project, while reportedly laying groundwork for one of the largest financing rounds in history.
Altman admitted that DeepSeek has lessened OpenAI’s lead in AI, and he said he believes OpenAI has been “on the wrong side of history” when it comes to open sourcing its technologies. While OpenAI has open sourced models in the past, the company has generally favored a proprietary, closed source development approach.
“[I personally think we need to] figure out a different open source strategy,” Altman said. “Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it’s also not our current highest priority … We will produce better models [going forward], but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years.”
In a follow-up reply, Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said that OpenAI is considering open sourcing older models that aren’t state-of-the-art anymore. “We’ll definitely think about doing more of this,” he said, without going into greater detail.
Beyond prompting OpenAI to reconsider its release philosophy, Altman said that DeepSeek has pushed the company to potentially reveal more about how its so-called reasoning models, like the o3-mini model released today, show their “thought process.” Currently, OpenAI’s models conceal their reasoning, a strategy intended to prevent competitors from scraping training data for their own models. In contrast, DeepSeek’s reasoning model, R1, shows its full chain of thought.
“We’re working on showing a bunch more than we show today — [showing the model thought process] will be very very soon,” Weil added. “TBD on all — showing all chain of thought leads to competitive distillation, but we also know people (at least power users) want it, so we’ll find the right way to balance it.”
Altman and Weil attempted to dispel rumors that ChatGPT, the chatbot platform through which OpenAI launches many of its models, would increase in price in the future. Altman said that he’d like to make ChatGPT “cheaper” over time, if feasible.
