OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman recently launched a survey on the social media platform X, asking users for their opinions on the company's next steps in open-source development.
This move comes amid significant transformations at OpenAI, as the company shifts its profit-driven division to a nonprofit model. Since receiving investment from Microsoft, OpenAI's relationship with open-source has changed dramatically. Especially following the release of GPT-4, OpenAI has gradually reduced its open-source contributions, focusing instead on smaller projects like Whisper. Altman previously mentioned that open-sourcing was paused for safety reasons, but he recently acknowledged that this strategy might have been a mistake, as competitors like Deepseek have already released their V3 and R1 models.
In this survey, Altman asked: “For our next open-source project, would it be more useful to launch a smaller o3-mini model or to develop the best model that can run on mobile phones?” As of now, the o3-mini model is leading in the votes, and the survey will conclude in 12 hours.
Although ChatGPT and OpenAI's API services remain leaders in the industry, open-source competitors have gradually emerged, with companies like Meta, Deepseek, Alibaba, and Mistral launching open-source models that can compete with OpenAI's products.
xAI plans to release Grok2 as open-source after launching Grok3. Launching an open-source o3-mini would provide users with a strong alternative without directly competing with OpenAI's high-end products, especially as GPT-4.5 is being tested and GPT-5 is set to be released soon.
This move does not mean OpenAI will return to its original open-source principles but rather indicates that a fully closed strategy is no longer sustainable in a rapidly changing competitive environment. Jan Leike, a former OpenAI employee, recently expressed concerns about the company's restructuring, criticizing OpenAI for narrowing its mission of "ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity" to smaller charitable initiatives in areas like healthcare, education, and science.
He believes that nonprofit organizations should support broader AI development initiatives, including AI governance, safety and adaptability research, as well as research addressing labor market impacts. Perhaps the release of open-source code could serve as a compromise, allowing safety researchers to better understand the workings of reasoning models.
Key Points:
🌟 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking user input on future open-source projects on the X platform, hinting at a possible return to the open-source arena.
📉 With the rise of competitors, OpenAI recognizes that a fully closed development strategy is no longer sustainable.
🔄 Open-source projects may promote AI safety research and governance, driving broader technological development.