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.