Turnaround at OpenAI: Sam Altman Acknowledges Mistakes in Closed-Source Strategy

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged on January 31, 2025, in a Reddit forum, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that his company had been "on the wrong side of history" regarding open-source artificial intelligence after the Chinese company DeepSeek AI's R1 model shook global markets. The announcement is particularly significant as OpenAI has increasingly favoured a closed, proprietary approach in recent years, which has drawn numerous criticisms from the industry and former allies, including Elon Musk.

The emergence of DeepSeek caused significant market turbulence after they announced that using just 2000 Nvidia H800 GPUs—compared to more than 10,000 chips used by more extensive AI labs—and with training costs of only $5.6 million (though total development costs were likely higher), they managed to create a model with performance comparable to OpenAI's systems. This announcement resulted in a historic plunge in Nvidia's shares, reducing the company's market value by nearly $600 billion, representing the most extensive single-day loss in the history of American companies.

In the Reddit AMA ("Ask Me Anything") forum, Altman stated that the closed-source approach enabled them to meet safety requirements more efficiently. However, he acknowledged that OpenAI "was on the wrong side of history" regarding the open-source approach and that a new strategy is needed. He added that while not all OpenAI colleagues share this view, and it's not their highest priority, internal discussions are taking place about publishing model weights and research results.

OpenAI's potential strategic shift would represent a return to the company's roots, which began in 2015 as a nonprofit organisation to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) would benefit humanity. Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI researcher, responded to the developments on LinkedIn, emphasising that open-source models outperform closed-source ones. He highlighted that these models create new ideas and build on others' work, and because their work is published and open-source, everyone can benefit from it. According to LeCun, this is the power of open research and open source.

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