OpenAI plans to once again live up to the adjective in its name.

The company announced that, “in the coming months,” it will release its first open-weights language model since GPT-2 in 2019.

The move comes as the splash caused by DeepSeek’s open models enlivened the open side of an ongoing split among AI developers. Meta’s release of its latest Llama 4 models this month, despite some controversy around benchmarking, has also amped up competition in the space.

Experts say OpenAI’s announcement speaks to growing competition from the open side of the debate, especially as businesses increasingly see open models as a gateway into generative AI or an alternative for highly regulated industries concerned about sensitive data.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hinted at such a release in the wake of DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model in January.

“I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open-source strategy,” Altman wrote in a Reddit AMA that month.

Keep reading here.—PK

It’s becoming something of a truism that AI is only as good as the data behind it. AI algorithms, after all, are products of the reams of data on which they’re trained.

This makes for a high-stakes situation in the world of autonomous vehicles, where it’s common for simulations based on data to play a crucial role in the testing process. That’s why AV trucking company Waabi sought to solve what founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun saw as a problem in the industry: Everyone’s using simulators, but there’s no universal framework for assessing how realistic these simulations actually are.

“It doesn’t matter how much you test unless that simulation really reflects reality,” Urtasun told Tech Brew. “If you’re testing something that is not realistic, even if you solve all the cases, who cares, if it’s not correlated with reality?”

Keep reading here.—JG

Feeling a little skeptical about the prospect of driving on the highway next to a truck with goods on board, but no driver behind the wheel?

Executives at Gatik get it. That’s why the autonomous trucking company, which is in the process of scaling a business around driverless freight deliveries, is committed to showing its work—and getting outside validation that everything is A-OK.

Gatik on Tuesday provided an update on a move it announced last fall: that it was commissioning a third-party assessment of its safety case, which is how AV companies determine their technology is safe enough for public roads.

“When there is rightly some hesitancy around autonomous vehicles—especially for those who are not building it; these are very complex systems—to have confidence that those who are making it are doing the right things, you need to be transparent,” Adam Campbell, Gatik’s head of safety innovation, told Tech Brew.

Keep reading here.—JG

Buckle up: Andrew Cornelia, president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging, is plugging into the future of EVs. Join us in New York or via livestream on May 29 as he sparks a high-voltage convo on fast-charging electrified roads—and what’s fueling the next era of transportation.