The whole competitive advantage from any company that sells a ML model through an API is that you can’t see how the sausage is made (you can’t see the model weights).

In a way, with o1, openai is just extending “the model” to one meta level higher. I totally see why they don’t want to give this away — it’d be like if any other proprietary API gave you the debugging output to their codes you could easily reverse engineer how it works.

That said, the name of the company is becoming more and more incongruous which I think is where most of the outrage is coming from.