DeepSeek’s growing popularity has prompted OpenAI to rethink its strategy for releasing artificial intelligence models. When it comes to open-sourcing its technologies, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that the ChatGPT-maker has been caught “on the wrong side of history”. “(I think we need to) figure out a different open source strategy,” Altman said in response to a question on Reddit. “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,” he added. Altman, along with OpenAI researchers, engineers, and executives, took questions from Reddit users on a wide range of topics in an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on the social media platform on Friday, January 31. OpenAI has previously released AI models such as Whisper and Jukebox under open-source licences. However, its flagship AI models such as o1 remain proprietary and closed systems. However, the future of OpenAI is now in question with the rise of its latest open-source competitor, DeepSeek. The underlying model architecture and model weights of DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model is fully open-source and distributed under a permissive MIT licence. This allows developers to download, modify, and reuse the model for free. Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, said that the company is considering open-sourcing older AI software. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, has been vocal in his criticism of the company for straying from its open-source roots. “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” he once said in a post on X. While DeepSeek-R1 has been positioned as a stronger alternative to o1, OpenAI has accused the Huangzhou-based firm of intellectual property theft.
