GPT-OSS 120B vs GPT-3.5 Turbo

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. Extremely low-cost text model

• One of the cheapest legacy models available.
• Suitable for very high-volume workloads with simple requirements.

2. Good for lightweight NLP tasks

• Classification, summarization, rewriting, paraphrasing, intent detection.
• Works for simple logic tasks and short reasoning sequences.

3. Works well for basic chatbots

• Optimized for Chat Completions API, originally powering early ChatGPT use cases.
• Good for rule-based or templated conversation flows.

4. Stable and predictable outputs

• Legacy behavior makes it suitable for systems built years ago that rely on its quirks.
• Good for backward compatibility or long-term enterprise pipelines.

5. Supports fine-tuning

• Useful for teams maintaining older fine-tuned GPT-3.5 models.
• Allows domain-specific compression of older datasets.

6. Limited capabilities compared to newer models

• No vision, no audio, no streaming, and no function calling.
• Much weaker reasoning and correctness vs GPT-4o mini or GPT-5.1.

7. Small context window (16K)

• Limited for multi-document tasks or long conversations.
• Best used for short, simple prompts or structured tasks.

8. Recommended migration path

• OpenAI explicitly recommends using GPT-4o mini instead.
• 4o mini is cheaper, smarter, faster, multimodal, and far more capable.