OpenAI is looking to experiment with a more “open” strategy, detailing its plans to release its first “open-weights” model to the developer community later this year. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman revealed that the upcoming open model will come with “reasoning” capabilities, similar to the company’s existing o3-mini model, which takes time to consider its responses to user’s prompts, increasing its accuracy. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s definition, an open-weights model is one that makes its weights transparent and publicly available. So users will be able to see the model’s weights and alter them, meaning they have a way to customize it without having to retrain it on new data. One advantage of open-weights models is that it’s cheaper for developers to make these adjustments and customize them for different tasks. It’s possible for an organization to upload internal data to an open-weights model and ensure it has the proper weights. Then it will be able to leverage that information when it generates its responses. It’s a lot easier than traditional model fine-tuning.