OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says They’ve ‘Been on the Wrong Side of History’

Might we see a more collaborative OpenAI freely sharing its research, only a week after the Chinese generative AI DeepSeek took a fish to the back of OpenAI’s head when it overtook ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app on the Apple App Store?

And then they followed it up days later with a blow to OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator with their own Janus-Pro image generator. What a week to compliment the challenger, tease a more open-source approach, and then, um, ignore other questions about it.

“I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open-source strategy; not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it’s also not our current highest priority,” OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, said in an “Ask Me Anything” thread on Reddit this past Friday.

He was responding to a question asking, “Would you consider releasing some model weights, and publishing some research?”

OpenAI has been somewhat closed off to the free flow of its information and research, and the response hints that Altman has been having second thoughts about that approach.

“Ask Me Anything,” or AMA, threads are popular ways for famous figures and key personnel at companies to engage with the public on Reddit in a text-based Q&A session. As in this case, the participants fielding the questions are typically verified by subreddit moderators to guarantee that forum posters aren’t engaging with an imposter.

Redditors pounced on the AMA thread like a pee-wee soccer team on a pizza buffet. They turned out about 2,000 comments on everything from the future of Whisper to Altman’s view on people using ChatGPT for therapy.

what a difference a week makes

Last week, OpenAI was crying foul amid claims that DeepSeek had violated its terms of use in using ChatGPT to build the DeepSeek generative AI.

Their tone was, well, whiny, especially after years of brushing aside concerns (and lawsuits) that OpenAI has been unfairly training its AI models, such as ChatGPT, on newspapers’ content and authors’ books.

Friday’s slightly more conciliatory stance was marked by a response to this question: “Let’s address this week’s elephant, Deepseek. Obviously a very impressive model and I’m aware it was likely trained on other LLM output,” asked one user. “How does this change your plans for future models?”

“It’s a very good model!” Altman replied. “We will produce better models, but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years.”

Notably, OpenAI’s participants left quite a few questions, observations, and accusations related to DeepSeek unanswered. Practically every AMA ends with unanswered questions because it takes longer to answer most questions than to ask them, though.

But there were six people there on behalf of OpenAI: Sam Altman, CEO (u/samaltman); Mark Chen, CRO (u/markchen90); Kevin Weil, CPO (u/kevinweil); Srinivas Narayanan, VP of Engineering (u/dataisf); Michelle Pokrass, API Research Lead (u/MichellePokrass); and Hongyu Ren, Research Lead.

And they only spared one hour to answer questions. It would’ve been nice to have heard more about how OpenAI pledges to be more open with its research, which, again, Altman said is “not our current highest priority”—jives with their allegations that DeepSeek might’ve been distilling ChatGPT’s bank of knowledge against its terms of use.

Perhaps one day, if OpenAI really does draw back the curtain on its operations just a teeny bit, they’ll also unveil what they really think about open source. But until then, the reasoning behind why they want to keep less under wraps remains, funnily enough, under wraps.