Will ChatGPT Ever Be Open‑Source? A Deep Dive into OpenAI’s Projects

Recently the author tried the ChatGPT AI chatbot, registered an account, and began a conversation that sparked curiosity about its openness.

Note: OpenAI has not announced any official open‑source plan for ChatGPT; the following opinions are personal.

Who created the viral ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a free AI chatbot service released by OpenAI, an artificial‑intelligence research lab consisting of the for‑profit OpenAI LP and the non‑profit OpenAI Inc. Founded in late 2015 in San Francisco, its mission is to promote and develop friendly AI for the benefit of humanity.

OpenAI is also behind the popular AI coding assistant Copilot, a collaboration with GitHub.

One of its founders is Elon Musk, former CEO of Tesla, who opened Tesla’s patents in 2014; the other is Sam Altman, former president of Y Combinator and a Stanford dropout.

OpenAI has received substantial funding, including a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019.

OpenAI and open source

The author examined OpenAI’s GitHub organization (https://github.com/openai) and selected four well‑known open‑source projects to illustrate the company’s attitude toward openness.

1. Reinforcement‑learning toolkit: Gym

Stars: 29.2k Language: Python (≈99.9%). Gym provides a collection of classic reinforcement‑learning environments such as games, robot control, and computer‑vision tasks, offering a unified interface for defining tasks, training agents, and evaluating performance.

Example environment: a cart‑pole where an agent must keep a pole balanced while moving the cart.

# CartPole‑v1 example
import gym
env = gym.make("CartPole-v1")
observation, info = env.reset(seed=42)

for _ in range(1000):
    action = env.action_space.sample()
    observation, reward, terminated, truncated, info = env.step(action)
    if terminated or truncated:
        observation, info = env.reset()

env.close()

Repository: https://github.com/openai/gym

2. Powerful speech‑recognition system: Whisper

Stars: 17.6k Language: Python. Whisper is an open‑source automatic speech‑recognition system that supports many languages, including Chinese, and performs well even with fast speech, accents, or background noise.

Repository: https://github.com/openai/whisper

3. Text‑to‑image generator: DALL·E

Stars: 9.3k Language: Python. DALL·E maps textual descriptions to corresponding images. For example, the prompt “a cat sunbathing in the afternoon” generates an image of a cat basking in sunlight. The model itself is not fully open‑source; only the image‑generation service is provided.

Repository: https://github.com/openai/DALL‑E

4. Large language models: GPT

GPT (Generative Pre‑trained Transformer) is a family of large pre‑trained language models introduced by OpenAI. GPT‑2 and GPT‑3 differ in scale and performance; GPT‑3, which powers ChatGPT, has not been open‑sourced.

ChatGPT is built on the latest GPT‑3.5 model.

GPT‑2: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2 GPT‑3: https://github.com/openai/gpt-3

These projects show that OpenAI has historically embraced openness, sharing research and tools that generate significant community interest.

However, in recent years OpenAI has shifted toward selective openness and monetizing its technology through paid APIs to protect core competitiveness.

Conclusion

The author believes ChatGPT will not become open‑source because its underlying model (GPT‑3.5) remains proprietary, and OpenAI’s commercial trajectory makes full openness unlikely.

While ChatGPT is not perfect, it has reshaped the author’s view of AI capabilities and sparked imagination about conversational human‑computer interaction, though expectations should be tempered.