I find the situation the big LLM players find themselves in quite ironic. Sam Altman promised (edit: under duress, from a twitter poll gone wrong) to release an open source model at the level of o3-mini to catch up to the perceived OSS supremacy of Deepseek/Qwen. Now Qwen3’s release makes a model that’s “only” equivalent to o3-mini effectively dead on arrival, both socially and economically.
I don't think they will ever do an open-source release, because then the curtains would be pulled back and people would see that they're not actually state of the art. Lama 4 already sort of tanked Meta's reputation, if OpenAI did that it'd decimate the value of their company.
If they do open sourcing something, I expect them to open-source some existing model (maybe something useless like gpt-3.5) rather than providing something new.
OAI in general seems to be treading water at best.
Still topping a lot of leaderboards but severely reduced rep. Chaotic naming, „ClosedAI“ image, undercut on pricing, competitors with much better licensing/open weights, stargate talk about Europe, Claude being seen as superior for coding etc. nothing end of the world but a lot of lukewarm misses
If I was an investor with financials that basically require magical returns from them to justify Vals I’d be worried.
OpenAI has the business development side entirely fleshed out and that’s not nothing. They’ve done a lot of turns tuning models for things their customers use.
