NLP Lineage

5 August 2025 · Reasoning

gpt-oss

gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b

OpenAI

Date
5 August 2025
What the date marks
Model release
Kind
Model
Organisation
OpenAI
Access
Apache 2.0
Threads
In the guided tour
Chapter 8. The weights get out
Learning phases
6. Local models and deployment

Too recent for its influence to be judged: no later milestone in the data descends from it yet. How levels are decided

Read the primary source (openai.com)

Full summary in progress. Until then, this page shows the milestone's record from the research data.

What it changed

Before it

OpenAI had released no open weights since GPT-2 in 2019.

The problem

The open ecosystem had consolidated around Meta and Chinese labs, with no US frontier lab participating.

What it introduced

Two open-weight reasoning models under Apache 2.0, trained with techniques from the o-series.

Why it matters

It reversed a six-year position and put a US frontier lab back in the open ecosystem.

What modern models inherit

Open weights as something every major lab now has a position on.

What came next

Continued competition with Qwen, DeepSeek and Kimi at the open end.

Before and after

The milestones it descends from, and the milestones that descend from it. Work developed alongside it is not counted. Weak links are left out unless you include them.

Before: where it came from

gpt-oss has 23 documented ancestors across 7 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 11 turning points among them.

gpt-oss has 23 documented ancestors across 7 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

gpt-oss has 78 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 13 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 25 turning points among them.

gpt-oss has 78 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 13 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

  1. 2025gpt-ossThis milestone.
  2. 2025o3 releasedgpt-oss built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2024o3 announcedo3 released succeeded thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  4. 2024o1 Turning pointo3 released built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2023Function callingo3 released was influenced by thisChapter 13. Models that act
  6. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointo1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  7. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  8. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  9. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  10. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  11. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  12. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  13. 2017Transformer Turning pointGPT-2 built directly on this
    Sparse Transformer built directly on this
    Scaling laws built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  14. 2016Layer normGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  15. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  16. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  17. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  18. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  19. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  20. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  21. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  22. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  23. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  24. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  1. 2025gpt-ossThis milestone.
  2. 2025o3 releasedgpt-oss built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2025DeepSeek-R1gpt-oss was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  4. 2024DeepSeek-V3DeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  5. 2024o3 announcedo3 released succeeded thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  6. 2024o1 Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by this
    o3 released built directly on this    Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  7. 2024Test-time computeDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  8. 2024Llama 3.1 405BDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  9. 2024GPT-4oDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  10. 2024DeepSeek-V2 / MLADeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  11. 2024Llama 3Llama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  12. 2024GRPODeepSeek-R1 built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  13. 2024DeepSeekMoEDeepSeek-V3 built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  14. 2024DeepSeek LLMGRPO built directly on thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  15. 2023GPT-4VGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  16. 2023Llama 2 Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by thisChapter 8. The weights get out
  17. 2023Position interpolationLlama 3.1 405B was influenced by thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  18. 2023Function callingo3 released was influenced by thisChapter 13. Models that act
  19. 2023Process supervisiono1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)
    GRPO was influenced by this (indirect influence)
    Test-time compute was influenced by this    Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  20. 2023DPOLlama 3.1 405B built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  21. 2023Grouped-query attention Turning pointDeepSeek-V2 / MLA was influenced by this
    Llama 3.1 405B built directly on this    Chapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  22. 2023Tree of thoughtsTest-time compute was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  23. 2023GPT-4 Turning pointGPT-4o built directly on thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  24. 2023LLaMA Turning pointLlama 2 built directly on this
    Position interpolation built directly on this    Chapter 8. The weights get out
  25. 2023ToolformerFunction calling was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 13. Models that act
  26. 2022GPT-3.5 Turning pointGPT-4 succeeded thisChapter 7. The assistant goes public
  27. 2022ReActFunction calling was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 13. Models that act
  28. 2022WhisperGPT-4o was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  29. 2022Chinchilla Turning pointDeepSeek LLM was influenced by this
    Llama 3.1 405B was influenced by this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  30. 2022STaRo1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)
    Test-time compute was influenced by this (indirect influence)    Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  31. 2022Self-consistencyTest-time compute built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  32. 2022InstructGPT Turning pointGRPO was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  33. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointDeepSeek-R1 was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  34. 2021WebGPTReAct was influenced by this
    Toolformer was influenced by this    Chapter 13. Models that act
  35. 2021GopherChinchilla built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  36. 2021FLANInstructGPT was influenced by thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  37. 2021RoPE Turning pointDeepSeek-V2 / MLA built directly on thisChapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  38. 2021CLIPGPT-4V was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  39. 2021Switch TransformerDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  40. 2020Vision TransformerCLIP built directly on thisChapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  41. 2020RLHF for summarisation Turning pointInstructGPT built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  42. 2020GShard Turning pointDeepSeekMoE built directly on thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  43. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  44. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by this
    DeepSeek LLM built directly on this    Chapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  45. 2019Multi-query attentionDeepSeek-V2 / MLA was influenced by thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  46. 2019T5 Turning pointSwitch Transformer built directly on this
    FLAN was influenced by this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  47. 2019C4 Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  48. 2019RLHF for LMsRLHF for summarisation built directly on thisChapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  49. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  50. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  51. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  52. 2019Transformer-XLSparse Transformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)
    RoPE was influenced by this    Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  53. 2018BERT Turning pointT5 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  54. 2018SentencePieceT5 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  55. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  56. 2018ELMoGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  57. 2018ULMFiTGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  58. 2017Mixed precisionDeepSeek-V3 was influenced by thisChapter 9. Making it run anywhere
  59. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  60. 2017RLHF origino1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 6. Teaching models what people want
  61. 2017Transformer Turning pointGPT-2 built directly on this
    Sparse Transformer built directly on this
    Scaling laws built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  62. 2017ConvS2STransformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  63. 2017Sparse MoE Turning pointDeepSeekMoE was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  64. 2016Layer normGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  65. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  66. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  67. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  68. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  69. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  70. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  71. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  72. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  73. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  74. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  75. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  76. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  77. 1997LSTM Turning pointSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  78. 1991Mixture of expertsSparse MoE built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  79. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability

After: what it led to

No documented descendants are recorded for gpt-oss without weak links.

No documented descendants are recorded for gpt-oss without weak links.

No recorded descendants are recorded for gpt-oss.

No recorded descendants are recorded for gpt-oss.

Direct links and their sources

Where it came from

Built directly on

Influenced by

Developed alongside

What it led to

None recorded in the sources used.