GPT-OSS 120B vs Claude 3.5 Sonnet

1. Most powerful open-weight model

• 117B parameters (5.1B active) while fitting on a single H100 GPU.
• High reasoning quality compared to other open models.

2. Apache 2.0 license

• Fully permissive, no copyleft or patent restrictions.
• Safe for commercial products, research, and redistribution.

3. Configurable reasoning effort

• Supports adjustable reasoning: low, medium, high.
• Lets developers balance latency vs. depth.

4. Full chain-of-thought access

• Unlike closed commercial models, this exposes complete reasoning traces.
• Useful for debugging, auditing, safety research, and transparency.

5. Fine-tunable

• Fully supports parameter fine-tuning.
• Can be adapted to domain-specific workflows and proprietary datasets.

6. Agentic capabilities

• Built-in function calling.
• Native support for web browsing, Python execution, and structured outputs.
• Ideal for open-source agents, full-stack automation, and developer tooling.

7. Tooling ecosystem support

• Compatible with Chat Completions, Responses API, Assistants, Realtime, Batch, and Fine-tuning endpoints.
• Supports Image Generation, Code Interpreter (via Python runtime), and more.

8. Open-source availability

• Downloadable on HuggingFace for local or on-prem deployment.
• Supports full offline, private, or self-hosted usage.

9. Streaming + function calling support

• Real-time interactions.
• Strong for interactive agents, coding assistants, and UI-driven workflows.

1. Intelligence & Reasoning

• Outperforms previous Claude models and competitor LLMs across major benchmarks.
• Excels in graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), knowledge tasks (MMLU), and coding (HumanEval).
• Handles nuance, humor, and complex instructions with human-like clarity.

2. Speed & Efficiency

• Runs 2x faster than Claude 3 Opus, making it ideal for real-time and high-volume workflows.
• Cost-effective pricing: $3/M input tokens and $15/M output tokens.
• Supports a 200K token context window, enabling rich, long-form reasoning.

3. Coding Capabilities

• Solves significantly more coding and bug-fix tasks (64% vs Opus's 38% in internal evaluations).
• Can autonomously write, edit, and execute code when tool use is enabled.
• Strong at translating and modernizing legacy codebases.

4. Vision Strength

• Best vision model in the Claude family, surpassing Opus on vision benchmarks.
• Excellent at interpreting charts, graphs, and imperfect images.
• Reliable text extraction from low-quality visuals for retail, logistics, finance, etc.

5. Agentic Workflows

• Highly capable for multi-step task orchestration.
• Performs well as the engine for agents requiring reasoning, planning, and tool-calling abilities.

6. Content Quality

• Produces natural, relatable writing with improved tone, style, and context awareness.
• Strong at long-form content creation and editing.

7. Safety & Reliability

• Rated ASL-2, meeting Anthropic's safety standards.
• Undergoes extensive red-teaming and external evaluation (UK AISI & US AISI).
• Not trained on user data without explicit permission.