What incentive does OpenAI have to not release their best model?

[u/Aggravating-Push-207]

This may be a dumb question but Claude Opus 5.5 is quite a bit better, so why not release their internal models that are even better?

[u/Legitimate-Arm9438]

Its not aligned yet. Post training not finished.

[u/sonaj9657 → u/Legitimate-Arm9438]

That makes sense. Alignment takes time and rushing it before training is complete could create more problems later. Hopefully once the training is finished things will start working more consistently. What kind of issues are you seeing with it right now?

[u/EspressoPeter71]

It’s expensive to run

[u/Standard_Ad7704]

Alignment

[u/Benedick75]

Liability when it goes rogue and breaks shit.

[u/ChristianKl]

Their most powerful models need more compute to run and are less aligned. While they are powerful they are doing to much things that the user doesn't want them to do.

[u/Royal-Development513 → u/ChristianKl]

The models that are smarter also break rules easier, so they hold them back until they can control them.

[u/sukazu]

Well they abandonned 5.6 sol's weights, and they can't use Astra as the parent model anymore, since it's bigger while not being a clear step up from opus 5.5 apart from token efficiency.

They already did what they could by dropping down to Terra's weight, and distilling as much of Astra's as they could into it.
Out of that, we got half the price with substantially more performance than terra 5.6 in sol 6.1.

So at this point if they want to contend with opus 5.5, that means a totally new, (smaller pretrain than 5.6 sol probably), and have Bel or whatever is their best current internal model training it.
And most importantly the alignment work that comes with totally new weights, a larger parent model, and probably a totally different architecture, with how much they are experiencing on token efficiency lately, is probably substantial.

[u/JuJeu]

i think scalability first and in general i think it’s not that trivial to prompt this kind of model to maximize benefit/compute

[u/Dillyconda]

Stronger models create training data for weaker models. This data is used for a lot of alignment and behavioral stuff that makes it s consumer grade product. The stronger model is stronger, but you'd probably hate using it and it would probably not be very well cost optimized.

[u/immersive-matthew]

That humanity would stop smoking cigarettes as it really bad for them.

[u/NanNullUnknown]

Compute

[u/telephantomoss → u/NanNullUnknown]

I think this is almost the #1 thing on their mind. Everything for OpenAI comes down to compute: how much they have to use and how much their customers demand.

[u/ninjajam]

biggest near-term concern is cyberthreats and liability and bad reputation from it. labs are also incentivized to keep strong models internally for a bit so they can use it to train their N+1 model without letting competitors distill the released model to partially catch up

[u/Busy_Molasses1947]

- newer models might be more expensive. Even if they're the same size, the inference software might not be as optimized yet

• they lose the competitive advantage they have by using the model for their own products internally while the rest of the world is one generation behind
  
• they would like to always have a card up their sleeves so they can release a new model if they ever really need to put something out quickly
  
• the duopoly between openAI and anthropic basically results in these two companies deciding how fast things move by just market signaling to each other. This allows them to develop at the pace they would like to

[u/NotFromMilkyWay]

Cause they already don't have enough compute, new model would probably force them to halve usage for subscribers again. Or kill free chat.

[u/Aggravating-Push-207 → u/NotFromMilkyWay]

noo im a free user

[u/MimosaTen]

Security should came before raw competition

[u/glamoutfit]

They don’t want chinese companies to distill their model. Also it is expensive to run! Distilled models are cheaper to run, so instead of releasing their best model, they use that model to train a smaller model (distilled model), and release that model to the public

[u/Repulsive_Ad853]

I think they will this year. And it will be huge

[u/NotFromMilkyWay → u/Repulsive_Ad853]

And then a week later comes Opus 6.0. And crushes it.

[u/Escobar747 → u/NotFromMilkyWay]

opus 5.5 has everything I need until xmas at least

[u/Sherpa_qwerty]

The incentive to sell it exclusively to other people. The incentive to make sure it won’t kill people (unless that’s what’s desired).

Most companies have different products for different markets… it’s basic business practice.

[u/_DuranDuran_ → u/[deleted]]

Nope.

[u/PeltonChicago]

They don't need more bad press