In a move that will be met with both applause and hand-wringing from artificial intelligence experts, OpenAI said on Tuesday that it was freely sharing two of its A.I. models used to power online chatbots.
Since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT three years ago, sparking the A.I. boom, it has mostly kept its technology under wraps. But many other companies, looking to undercut OpenAI, have aggressively shared their technology through a process called open source.
Now, OpenAI hopes to level the playing field and ensure that businesses and other software developers stick with its technology.
OpenAI’s shift adds more fuel to a long-running debate between researchers who believe it is in every company’s interest to open-source their technology, and national security hawks and A.I. safety pessimists who believe American companies should not be sharing their technology.
The China hawks and A.I. worriers appear to be losing ground. In a notable reversal, the Trump administration recently allowed Nvidia, the world’s leading maker of the computer chips used to create A.I. systems, to sell a version of its chips in China.
Many of the San Francisco company’s biggest rivals, particularly Meta and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek, have already embraced open source, setting OpenAI up as one of the few A.I. companies not sharing what it was working on.
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The post OpenAI to Give Away Some of the Technology That Powers ChatGPT appeared first on New York Times.
