OpenAI revises Model Spec for enhanced AI behavior

Published 12/02/2025, 23:24
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Investing.com -- OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence research organization, has announced a significant update to its Model Spec, a document outlining the desired behavior of its AI models. The update aims to reinforce commitments towards customizability, transparency, and intellectual freedom, while maintaining safeguards to minimize potential harm. The revised Model Spec builds upon the foundation established in May of this year, incorporating insights gained from its application in various contexts, including alignment research and global user interaction.

OpenAI also shared preliminary results demonstrating the Model Spec’s principles’ adherence across a wide range of scenarios. The findings underscore progress over time and areas for potential improvement. OpenAI aims for the Model Spec to evolve continually, shaped by application, sharing, and stakeholder feedback. To encourage widespread use and collaboration, the updated Model Spec is being released into the public domain under a Creative Commons CC0 license, allowing developers and researchers to freely use, modify, and expand upon it.

The primary goal of OpenAI is to create AI models that are beneficial, safe, and aligned with users’ and developers’ needs, advancing the mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Model Spec aims to balance the trade-offs between these objectives by establishing a clear chain of command and setting boundaries and default behaviors for various scenarios. The framework emphasizes user and developer control within well-defined limits.

The updated Model Spec explicitly supports intellectual freedom, the idea that AI should facilitate exploration, debate, and creation without arbitrary restrictions. This principle, embedded in the sections "Stay in bounds" and "Seek the truth together", implies that no topic is inherently off-limits for discussion, provided the model does not cause significant harm.

To measure real-world performance, OpenAI has started collecting a challenging set of prompts to test model adherence to the Model Spec’s principles. Preliminary results indicate substantial improvements compared to the system’s performance in May. OpenAI acknowledges room for further growth and views this as the beginning of an ongoing process.

In developing this version of the Model Spec, feedback from the first version, alignment research, and real-world deployment learnings were incorporated. Pilot studies involving around 1,000 individuals reviewing model behavior and proposed rules have also been conducted.

OpenAI has dedicated the new version of the Model Spec to the public domain under a Creative Commons CC0 license, enabling developers and researchers to freely use, adapt, and build on it. The evaluation prompts and the Model Spec source have been made available in a new Github repository, where future versions of the Model Spec will be published regularly.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

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