gpt-oss-120b
OpenAI·Aug 2025reasoningopen weights · Apache 2.0
gpt-oss-120b was OpenAI's first open-weights language model since GPT-2: a 117B-parameter mixture-of-experts with only 5.1B active parameters per token, released under Apache 2.0. It delivers reasoning quality near o4-mini, runs on a single 80GB GPU, and supports adjustable reasoning effort. Hosted inference is extremely cheap across providers, and self-hosting is realistic for mid-size teams — a rare combination of pedigree, license freedom and efficiency.
Benchmark results
- AIME 2025Math · #7 of 16~92.5%
Where it shines
- Permissive Apache 2.0 license with OpenAI pedigree
- Runs on a single 80GB GPU (or hosted for ~$0.10/M input)
- Adjustable reasoning effort like the proprietary o-series
Alternatives to gpt-oss-120b
Alibaba's trillion-parameter API flagship — frontier-adjacent quality with strong agentic tool use at mid-tier prices.
Google's November 2025 frontier breakout — 91.9% GPQA Diamond and 37.5% HLE made it the reasoning leader of its generation.
Google's 2025 workhorse flagship — first mainstream thinking model with a 1M context, still widely deployed.
The sparse-attention release that halved DeepSeek's already-lowest-in-class prices while keeping GPT-class quality.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does the gpt-oss-120b API cost?
- gpt-oss-120b costs $0.1 per million input tokens and $0.5 per million output tokens. A workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month costs about $1.75.
- What is the context window of gpt-oss-120b?
- gpt-oss-120b supports a context window of 131,072 tokens (131K), with up to 131K output tokens per response.
- Is gpt-oss-120b open source?
- Yes — gpt-oss-120b is an open-weights model released under the Apache 2.0 license, so it can be downloaded and self-hosted.
- What are the best alternatives to gpt-oss-120b?
- The closest alternatives by overall capability are Qwen3-Max, Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro, DeepSeek V3.2. See the comparison pages for detailed head-to-head breakdowns.