For the first time in roughly five years, OpenAI is gearing up to release an AI system that’s truly “open,” meaning it’ll be available for download at no cost and not gated behind an API. TechCrunch reported on Wednesday that OpenAI is aiming for an early summer launch, and targeting performance superior to open models from Meta and DeepSeek.
Beyond its benchmark performance, OpenAI may have a key feature up its sleeve — one that could make its open “reasoning” model highly competitive, TechCrunch has learned.
Company leaders have been discussing plans to enable the open model to connect to OpenAI’s cloud-hosted models to better answer complex queries, two sources familiar with the matter tell TechCrunch. During a recent meeting with developers in the open source AI community, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the capability as a “handoff,” according to one of the sources.
OpenAI did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
If the feature — as sources describe it — makes it into the open model, it will be able to make calls to the OpenAI API to access the company’s other, larger models for a substantial computational lift. It’s unclear if the open model will have the ability to access some of the many tools OpenAI’s models can use, like web search and image generation.
The idea for the handoff feature was suggested by a developer during one of OpenAI’s recent developer forums, according to a source. The suggestion appears to have gained traction within the company. OpenAI has been hosting a series of community feedback events with developers to help shape its upcoming open model release.
A local model that can tap into more powerful cloud systems brings to mind Apple Intelligence, Apple’s suite of AI capabilities that uses a combination of on-device models and models running in “private” data centers. OpenAI stands to benefit in obvious ways. Beyond generating incremental revenue, a handoff could rope more members of the open source community into the company’s premium ecosystem.
There are many unknowns around how OpenAI’s open model handoff feature might work, including what the pricing and rate limits may be. The model is in the early stages, and it’s possible that aspects of it could change or otherwise not come to fruition.
OpenAI is in the process of training a new model from scratch rather than repurposing an old one for its open release, sources tell TechCrunch. One source told TechCrunch the open model is expected to underperform OpenAI’s o3, but outperform DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model on certain benchmarks.