To cap off a day of product releases, OpenAI researchers, engineers, and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, answered questions in a wide-ranging Reddit AMA on Friday.OpenAI finds itself in a bit of a precarious position. Its battling the perception that its ceding ground in the AI race to Chinese companies like DeepSeek, which OpenAI alleges mightve stolen its IP. The ChatGPT maker has been trying to shore up its relationship with Washington and simultaneously pursue an ambitious data center project, while reportedly laying groundwork for one of the largest financing rounds in history.Altman admitted that DeepSeek has lessened OpenAIs lead in AI, and he said he believes OpenAI has been on the wrong side of history when it comes to open sourcing its technologies. While OpenAI has open sourced models in the past, the company has generally favored a proprietary, closed source development approach.[I personally think we need to] figure out a different open source strategy, Altman said. Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and its also not our current highest priority We will produce better models [going forward], but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years.In a follow-up reply, Kevin Weil, OpenAIs chief product officer, said that OpenAI is considering open sourcing older models that arent state-of-the-art anymore. Well definitely think about doing more of this, he said, without going into greater detail.Beyond prompting OpenAI to reconsider its release philosophy, Altman said that DeepSeek has pushed the company to potentially reveal more about how its so-called reasoning models, like the o3-mini model released today, show their thought process. Currently, OpenAIs models conceal their reasoning, a strategy intended to prevent competitors from scraping training data for their own models. In contrast, DeepSeeks reasoning model, R1, shows its full chain of thought.Were working on showing a bunch more than we show today [showing the model thought process] will be very very soon, Weil added. TBD on all showing all chain of thought leads to competitive distillation, but we also know people (at least power users) want it, so well find the right way to balance it.Altman and Weil attempted to dispel rumors that ChatGPT, the chatbot platform through which OpenAI launches many of its models, would increase in price in the future. Altman said that hed like to make ChatGPT cheaper over time, if feasible.Altman previously said that OpenAI was losing money on its priciest ChatGPT plan, ChatGPT Pro, which costs $200 per month.In a somewhat related thread, Weil said that OpenAI continues to see evidence that more compute power leads to better and more performant models. Thats in large part whats necessitating projects such as Stargate, OpenAIs recently announced massive data center project, Weil said. Serving a growing user base is fueling compute demand within OpenAI as well, he continued.Asked about recursive self-improvement that might be enabled by these powerful models, Altman said he thinks a fast takeoff is more plausible than he once believed. Recursive self-improvement is a process where an AI system could improve its own intelligence and capabilities without human input.Of course, its worth noting that Altman is notorious for overpromising. It wasnt long ago that he lowered OpenAIs bar for AGI.One Reddit user asked whether OpenAIs models, self-improving or not, would be used to develop destructive weapons specifically nuclear weapons. This week, OpenAI announced a partnership with the U.S. government to give its models to the U.S. National Laboratories in part for nuclear defense research.Weil said he trusted the government.Ive gotten to know these scientists and they are AI experts in addition to world class researchers, he said. They understand the power and the limits of the models, and I dont think theres any chance they just YOLO some model output into a nuclear calculation. Theyre smart and evidence-based and they do a lot of experimentation and data work to validate all their work.The OpenAI team was asked several questions of a more technical nature, like when OpenAIs next reasoning model, o3, will be released (more than a few weeks, less than a few months, Altman said); when the companys next flagship non-reasoning model, GPT-5, might land (dont have a timeline yet, said Altman); and when OpenAI might unveil a successor to DALL-E 3, the companys image-generating model. DALL-E 3, which was released around two years ago, has gotten rather long in the tooth. Image-generation tech has improved by leaps and bounds since DALL-E 3s debut, and the model is no longer competitive on a number of benchmark tests.Yes! Were working on it, Weil said of a DALL-E 3 follow-up. And I think its going to be worth the wait.