The two new models from OpenAI are available under the Apache 2.0 license, a popular choice for open-weight models. With Apache 2.0, models can be used for commercial purposes, redistributed, and included as part of other licensed software. Open-weight model releases from Alibaba’s Qwen as well as Mistral also operate under Apache 2.0.

The company unveiled two new open-weight language models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, marking its first public release of freely available AI model weights since GPT-2 in 2019, long before the AI hype took over the tech world.

If open-weights is a new piece of AI jargon to you, don't worry. In the simplest possible terms, open-weights is a category of AI models that power products like chatbots, image and video generators.