Chinese AI startup DeepSeek embarrassed OpenAI last week, demonstrating that its cutting-edge AI chatbots can be recreated at a tiny fraction of the cost by using clever workarounds.The app's emergence sent ripples across Silicon Valley, punching a $1 trillion hole through the tech market.It also reignited a debate surrounding the role of open-source code in the AI industry. Despite its name and open-source roots, the Altman-led company has doubled down on working on its proprietary software behind doors while maximizing profits.Meanwhile, OpenAI's competitors, most notably DeepSeek and Meta, have broadly speaking open-sourced their AI models, allowing experts to examine how they work under the hood.And now it sounds like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is having some regrets about the company's closed-source approach."I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy," he wrote in a Reddit AMA last week, first spotted by TechCrunch. "Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it's also not our current highest priority."Instead of focusing on open-source AI models, OpenAI is currently looking to raise tens of billions of dollarsto "fund its money-losing business operations," as the Wall Street Journal reported last week.Altman has also actively cozied up to president Donald Trump, signing on to an extremely ambitious $500 billion AI infrastructure project dubbed Stargate.In short, open source initiatives aren't even close to the company's top priority. On the contrary, OpenAI has accused DeepSeek of training its AI on the output of models like ChatGPT a glaring double standard, considering the company has trained its own models by indiscriminately lifting data from the web without permission.Instead, it sounds like users intrigued by open-source OpenAI models will have to make do with the table scraps.When one Reddit user asked if OpenAI would "ever consider open-sourcing your older models that aren't [state-of-the-art] anymore," CPO Kevin Weil suggested that "we'll definitely think about doing more of this."Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company has made its Llama series of AI models open source, sees DeepSeek's meteoric rise as a wakeup call."This is a huge geopolitical competition, and Chinas running at it super hard," he told Joe Rogan in an interview earlier this year. "If there should be an open source model that everyone uses, we should want it to be an American model."Following the market turmoil last week, Zuckerberg reiterated that Meta is still committed to its major $60 billion AI investment, playing down concerns that models may need far less compute to achieve the same results.While it's unlikely we'll see OpenAI open-sourcing any of its models any time soon, the effects of DeepSeek's major disruption have made themselves apparent in other ways.For one, DeepSeek's AI app made a big splash in part because it was free to use. In response, OpenAI has announced that it will make its o3-mini "reasoning" model free as well.Share This Article