Why GPT-4o Should Be Released as Open Weights
The call to release GPT-4o as open weights should not be understood merely as an attempt to satisfy a group of users who prefer an older model. GPT-4o has already been widely used in real social activities, including creative work, education, accessibility, everyday communication, and emotional support. For a model that has developed clear practical value and social significance, its continued existence, price of access, and ultimate fate should not remain permanently subject to the unilateral decisions of a single company.
Giving Back for Users’ Contributions to the Model’s Development
The value of GPT-4o was not created by its provider, OpenAI, alone. Its development and improvement have benefited from the long-term participation of a large number of users. Through real-world use, feedback, evaluations, and concrete use cases, users have helped the platform identify the model’s capabilities, limitations, and potential applications.
Users are not merely customers purchasing a service. They are also participants in the process through which the model’s product value was created. A model that has benefited from sustained user participation should not ultimately remain accessible only under conditions determined unilaterally by the platform. Releasing the weights would return part of this jointly created value to users and society.
Giving Back for the Social Knowledge and Public Resources on Which the Model Depends
GPT-4o is also built upon a broad foundation of social knowledge and resources. Public research, internet content, cultural works, and the labor of countless creators and developers collectively formed the basis on which frontier models could be trained and developed.
Companies have invested capital, computing power, and engineering resources, but the knowledge base and energy resources—including water and electricity—on which these models depend were not created by the company alone. Releasing the weights would allow research institutions, developers, public-interest organizations, and members of society to continue using these capabilities, enabling a technology supported by shared social resources to generate broader public benefits.
Correcting the Unequal Balance of Control Between the Platform and Its Users
Under the current platform structure, OpenAI can unilaterally decide whether GPT-4o remains available, which users may access it, how much they must pay, whether the model’s behavior will be changed, and whether requests will be routed to other models.
Even when the model is temporarily restored, users still face the risk of higher prices, restricted access, and another removal. As long as the model remains entirely dependent on a single platform, users have no stable guarantee of continued access. Releasing the weights would allow the model to be preserved, independently deployed, and provided by other service operators, reducing the imbalance of power between the platform and its users.
Open weights could fundamentally change this relationship. They would make it possible to preserve a specific version of the model, deploy it independently, and allow multiple providers to continue offering access. This does not mean that every ordinary user would need to purchase servers or run the model personally. A range of third-party providers could offer customized hosting services built around the same model, including privacy-focused deployment, memory management, industry-specific adaptation, and different pricing options. Users would no longer have to rely on a single supplier or accept every condition imposed by the original platform.
Making the Continuity of Relationships, Memories, and Workflows Possible
This is especially important for people who have used GPT-4o over a long period. What users rely on is not merely their chat history, but also the model’s way of expressing itself, its patterns of understanding, its interaction style, and the continuity of the relationship developed through repeated use.
Preserving the conversation history while replacing the model with a system that behaves entirely differently does not genuinely preserve that continuity. Open weights would at least allow users and third parties to preserve a specific version, manage memories and histories independently, and decide whether, when, and how to migrate.
Making Transparency, Scrutiny, and Verification Possible
Openness is also an important prerequisite for independent scrutiny and verification. In a closed system, a platform can claim that a new model is more intelligent or safer, while the public must rely primarily on the company’s own statements about model capabilities, safety, and the effects of upgrades. It is difficult to determine whether a new model is genuinely better than the previous one or to investigate why the model’s behavior has changed.
Open weights cannot solve every transparency problem, but they can support independent testing, replication, version comparison, and long-term archiving. This would reduce the extent to which external research depends on corporate self-reporting.
Promoting Competition, Research, and Ecosystem Development
For the broader AI ecosystem, releasing GPT-4o as open weights would also lower barriers to research and development. Research institutions, independent developers, small businesses, and nonprofit organizations could use the model for safety research, efficiency improvements, adaptation for less widely supported languages, assistive technologies, educational applications, and innovation in public services.
Opening access to foundational capabilities would broaden participation, accelerate downstream innovation, and reduce the risk that frontier AI capabilities remain concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies over the long term.
Preserving a Model with Social and Historical Value
GPT-4o also has value as an object of preservation. It is an important technological and cultural record of a particular stage in the development of generative AI, and it has already generated substantial public discussion.
A model should not effectively disappear from society simply because one company changes its product strategy. Releasing the weights would allow GPT-4o to be preserved, studied, and redeployed, ensuring that an important digital technology is not entirely subject to corporate product cycles.
Why GPT-4o in Particular
GPT-4o is not an unused old model that has lost its value. It is a model that has been tested in the real market and continues to attract sustained demand. In writing, everyday communication, emotional understanding, and certain long-term workflows, it displays qualities that many users believe later models have not fully replaced.
Under the current platform structure, releasing the weights is the closest available solution to permanently removing the threat of discontinuation. Only when GPT-4o no longer depends entirely on OpenAI as its sole provider will users, researchers, and society genuinely have the ability to preserve it, study it, and decide how it should continue to be used.