OpenAI's new open-source model is basically Phi-5

Yeah, makes sense. Good observations regarding the benchmark vs. vibes in general, and I didn't know / made the connection between the lead of phi models going to oAI and gpt-oss. Could very well be a similar exercise + their "new" prompt level adherence (system > developer > user). In all the traces I've seen of refusals the model "quotes" the policy quite religiously. Similar thing was announced for gpt5.

I think the mention of the "horny people" is warranted, they are an important part of the open models (and first to explore the idea of "identities / personas" for LLMs, AFAIK). Plenty of fine-tuning bits of know-how trickled from there to the "common knowledge".

There's a thing that I would have liked to be explored, perhaps. The idea that companies might actually want what -oss offers. While the local llm communities might want freedom and a horny assistant, businesses absolutely do not want that. And in fact they spend a lot of effort into implementing (sometimes less than ideal) guardrails, to keep the models on track. For very easy usecases like support chatbots and the like, businesses will always prefer something that errs on the side of less than useful but "safe", rather than have the bot start going crazy with sex/slurs/insults/etc.

I do have a problem with this section though:

> Really open weight, not open source, because the weights are freely available but the training data and code is not.

This is factually incorrect. The -oss models are by definition open source. Apache2.0 is open source (I think even the purists agree with this). The requirement of sharing "training data and code" is absolutely not a prerequisite for being open source (and historically it was never required. The craze surrounding LLMs suddenly made this a thing. It's not).

Here's the definition of source in "open source":

> "Source" form shall mean the preferred form for making modifications, including but not limited to software source code, documentation source, and configuration files.

Well, for LLMs the weights are the "preffered form of making modifications". The labs themselves modify models the same as you are allowed to by the license! They might use more advanced tools, or better datasets, but in the end the definition still holds. And you get all the other stuff, like the right to modify, re-release, etc. I'd really wish people would stop proliferating this open weight nonsense.

Models released under open source licenses are open source. gpt-oss, qwens and mistrals (apache2.0), deepseeks(MIT), etc.

Models released under non open source licenses also exist, and they're not open source because the licenses under which they're released aren't. LLamas, gemmas, etc.

The key is if you consider weights source code. I do not think this is a common interpretation.

> The labs themselves modify models the same as you are allowed to by the license

Do the labs do not use source code?

It is a bit like arguing that releasing a binary executable is releasing the source code. One could claim developers modify the binary the same as you are allowed to.

"Good observations regarding the benchmark vs. vibes in general"

Most "vibes" people are missing that it as only has 5B active parameters.

They read 120B and expect way more performance than a 24B parameter model, even though empricaly a 120B model with 5B active parameters is expected to perform right around there.

The license gives you the right to modify the weights, how you do the modification is up to you. The rest is in the realm of IP, know-how, etc. Apples and oranges.

I think source code really only exists in terms of the source code/object code dichotomy, so what "traditional" open source means for model weights is really not obvious if you only go off of traditional definitions. Personally I think the word "open source" shouldn't apply here anymore than it would for art or binary code.

Consider the following: it is possible to release binaries under the Apache2 license. Microsoft has, at least at one point, released a binary under the BSD license. These binaries are not open source because they are not source.

This isn't the same argument as given in the article though, so I guess it is a third position.