US Launches GPT-OSS: A First in Modern Open-Source Models – How Does It Compare to Chinese Alternatives?

Recently, OpenAI made a significant stride by unveiling open-weight models, a notable move in a market largely dominated by leading Chinese AI companies.

OpenAI’s Open-Weight Models Outperform Chinese Counterparts in Key Areas

American tech firms are beginning to embrace strategies that have long been utilized by their Chinese counterparts, particularly in the integration of open-source frameworks with large language models (LLMs).This shift aligns with the priorities articulated in former President Trump’s AI action plan, which emphasized the importance of open-source AI models. As a result, OpenAI has launched its gpt-oss series, representing its first set of open-weight models since GPT-2, available in two configurations: gpt-oss-20b and gpt-oss-120b.

Examining the technical specifications of these new models, the gpt-oss-20b boasts an impressive 21 billion parameters and utilizes a mixture of experts (MoE) transformer architecture. It also offers a substantial context window of up to 131, 072 tokens, making it compatible with 16GB VRAM platforms, allowing it to run efficiently on most consumer-grade GPUs. Conversely, the larger gpt-oss-120b, featuring a robust 117 billion parameters, excels in reasoning tasks but necessitates a more powerful NVIDIA H100 platform for optimal performance.

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Significantly, these models are distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, which grants permissions for commercial usage, modification, and redistribution. This open-source nature positions them similarly to their Chinese equivalents. As OpenAI enters this space, it appears to be strategically responding to the advancements made by Chinese AI firms, which have developed open-source ecosystems for several years. Apart from Meta’s LLaMA, the U. S.has seen little movement in mainstream open-source models until now.

With OpenAI’s foray into open-weight models, there are expectations for future releases. Comparing gpt-oss to Chinese alternatives reveals that while OpenAI has made commendable progress, Chinese models typically have a higher parameter count. For instance, prominent models like DeepSeek V2 and Qwen 3 boast significantly larger parameter numbers:

Category	GPT‑OSS 120B / 20B	DeepSeek-V2 / R1	Qwen3 / Qwen2.5 / QwQ
Organization	OpenAI	DeepSeek (China)	Alibaba (China)
Model Type	Sparse MoE (Mixture of Experts)	Sparse MoE	Dense & MoE hybrids
Total Parameters	120B / 20B	236B / 67B	235B / 72B / 32B / others
Active Parameters	~5.1B / ~3.6B	~21B / ~6.7B	~22B (Qwen3-235B) / ~3B (Qwen3-30B-A3B)
Context Window	128K tokens	128K tokens	128K (Qwen3), 32K (Qwen2.5)

While the total and active parameter counts are important, they are not the only factors determining a model’s superiority. Nevertheless, Chinese counterparts have a considerable advantage, primarily due to their years of experience. To assess their real-time performance, various benchmarks, including the MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) and AIME Math, were compared. These assessments were conducted by Clarifai and reveal notable insights:

Benchmark Task	GPT‑OSS‑120B	GLM‑4.5	Qwen‑3 Thinking	DeepSeek R1	Like K2
MMLU‑Pro (Reasoning)	~90.0%	84.6%	84.4%	85.0%	81.1%
AIME Math (w/tools)	~96.6–97.9%	~91%	~92.3%	~87.5%	~49–69%
GPQA (PhD Science)	~80.9%	79.1%	81.1%	81.0%	75.1%
SWE‑bench (Coding)	62.4%	64.2%	—	~65.8%	~65.8%
TAU‑bench (Agents)	~67.8%	79.7%	~67.8%	~63.9%	~70.6%
BFCL‑v3 (Function Calling)	~67–68%	77.8%	71.9%	37%	—

The results clearly show that gpt-oss excels in reasoning and mathematical tasks, marking it as a formidable competitor within its peer group. Additionally, it has a smaller active parameter footprint compared to many dense models, making it a more economical option for users seeking local AI solutions. However, the benchmarks indicate that for agentic tasks and multilingual capabilities, the gpt-oss-120b model still trails behind some Chinese alternatives, yet it remains a strong contender in the market.

The emergence of open-weight models is vital for the AI industry, as they foster a more inclusive ecosystem. With this initiative, OpenAI has the potential to bolster the U. S.presence in an arena previously dominated by Chinese organizations. This milestone is likely to bring satisfaction to Sam Altman and the OpenAI team as they navigate this competitive landscape.

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