OpenAI’s open weights model now coming «later this summer»

The company first announced that it will be launching an open weights model on a generous license in April 2025 — and now it has a slightly delayed, yet slightly firmer release date.

The timeline for the release was originally slated for early summer, writes TechCrunch.

Announced to compete with Llama, DeepSeek
An open weights model basically means you can run the AI on your computer, tinker with it, and modify the «weights,» whitch means the leveling, the priorities and instructions of the model itself.

The announcement came just as the DeepSeek and Llama crazes were running at a high pitch, and OpenAI might have felt a little uncomfortable at the competition.

Not in June, but this summer
Yesterday, Sam Altman tweeted out a development update, and the firmer timeline of «this summer:»

we are going to take a little more time with our open-weights model, i.e. expect it later this summer but not june.

our research team did something unexpected and quite amazing and we think it will be very very worth the wait, but needs a bit longer.

— Sam Altman (@sama) June 10, 2025

The open weights model is supposed to be a «very, very good model,» said Altman at the time, while adding that the crew at OpenAI were «excited» about its creation.

Generous license
They have been collecting developer feedback in a form since April.

The license for the model should be more generous than what Meta uses for it’s Llama models, which prohibits use for large, commercial organizations — meaning it will likely come with far fewer restrictions than the current open source models offer.

Read more: TechCrunch has a writeup, and teknotum’s coverage of the announcement