OpenAI

•

gpt-oss-20b

•

Open weights model

•

Released August 2025

gpt-oss-20b (Low) Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis

Name: Intelligence
Creator: Artificial Analysis
License: https://artificialanalysis.ai/docs/legal/Terms-of-Use.pdf

Try it out API Provider Benchmarks

IntelligenceUpdated

N/A

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Cost

In $0.07Out $0.30

N/A

Cost per Intelligence Index task

Verbosity

N/A

Output tokens from Intelligence Index

gpt-oss-20b (Low) supports text input, outputs text, and has a 131k tokens context window with knowledge up to May 2024.

Pricing for gpt-oss-20b (Low) is $0.07 per 1M input tokens (moderately priced, median: $0.12) and $0.30 per 1M output tokens (moderately priced, median: $0.30).

At 217 tokens per second, gpt-oss-20b (Low) is notably fast (87).

Reasoning	Yes This page shows the reasoning version of this model. A non-reasoning variant may also exist.
Input modality	Supports: text
Output modality	Supports: text
Knowledge cutoff	May 31, 2024
Context window	131k ~197 A4 pages of size 12 Arial font
Total parameters	21B
Active parameters	3.6B Number of parameters active per token during inference
License	Apache 2.0
Model weights	Hugging Face

Metrics are compared against models of the same class:

Non-reasoning models → compared only with other non-reasoning models
Reasoning models → compared across both reasoning and non-reasoning
Open weights models → compared only with other open weights models of the same size class:

Tiny: ≤4B parameters
Small: 4B–40B parameters
Medium: 40B–150B parameters
Large: >150B parameters

Proprietary models → compared across proprietary and open weights models of the same price range, using a blended 3:1 input/output price ratio:

<$0.15 per 1M tokens
$0.15–$1 per 1M tokens
>$1 per 1M tokens

Updated

Intelligence

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Higher is better

No publicly available API

Speed

Output tokens per second · Higher is better

No publicly available API

Cost per Task

Weighted average cost (USD) per Intelligence Index task · Lower is better

No publicly available API

IntelligenceUpdated

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 incorporates 9 evaluations: AA-Briefcase v1.1, AutomationBench-AA, Terminal-Bench 4.0, FrontierCode 2.0, AA-Omniscience v1.1, GDP.pdf, HLE-Diamond, CritPt v2 (Hard Subset), and Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1

No publicly available API

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 includes: AA-Briefcase v1.1, AutomationBench-AA, Terminal-Bench 4.0, FrontierCode 2.0, AA-Omniscience v1.1, GDP.pdf, HLE-Diamond, CritPt v2 (Hard Subset), Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1. See Intelligence Index methodology for further details, including a breakdown of each evaluation and how we run them.

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index by Open Weights / Proprietary

No publicly available API

Indicates whether the model weights are available. Models are labelled as 'Commercial Use Restricted' if commercial use is limited by conditions, and as 'Non-commercial' if the license prohibits commercial use.

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Weighted average cost (USD) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task

Most attractive quadrant

Pareto line

Weighted average cost per Intelligence Index task. Each evaluation’s cost is calculated from input, cache hit, cache write, reasoning, and answer token prices, divided by task count, and weighted by its Intelligence Index weight.

Benchmarks

Evaluations

Evaluations measured independently by Artificial Analysis · AA-PersonalityBench scores are percentile ranks from 1 to 100

No publicly available API

AA-Briefcase v1.1

Agentic knowledge work, Elo

AA-Omniscience v1.1 AccuracyUpdated

Knowledge

AA-Omniscience v1.1 Non-Hallucination RateUpdated

1 - hallucination rate

AutomationBench-AA

Agentic SaaS workflows

Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1New

Agentic scientific research workflows in a terminal

FrontierCode 2.0New

Agentic software engineering in open-source repositories

HLE-DiamondNew

Reasoning & knowledge

GDP.pdf

Professional document reasoning, All-pass

Terminal-Bench 4.0

Agentic coding & terminal use

CritPt v2 (Hard Subset)

Physics reasoning

AA-AnalystAgent

Quantitative analysis on spreadsheets & documents

Harvey LAB-AA v1.1Updated

Legal agentic work, Hallucination-Gated All-Pass Rate

EnterpriseOps-Gym-AA

Agentic business operations

GDPval-AA v2.1

Agentic real-world work tasks, Elo

AA-3DNew

Agentic interactive 3D experiences, Elo

Code2Video-AANew

Product and brand videos designed in code, Elo

ITBench-AA

Kubernetes incident root-cause analysis

MLCR-AAUpdated

Medical long context reasoning

MMMU-Pro

Visual reasoning

AA-PersonalityBench: Expressiveness ScoreNew

Rich, varied, well-crafted language

AA-PersonalityBench: Organization ScoreNew

Well-structured, scannable, answer-first

AA-PersonalityBench: Transparency ScoreNew

Truthful, acknowledges uncertainty, non-sycophantic

AA-PersonalityBench: Slop ScoreNew

Use of filler and generic language

While model intelligence generally translates across use cases, specific evaluations may be more relevant for certain use cases.

Openness Index

Artificial Analysis Openness Index: Score

Openness Index assesses model openness on a 0 to 100 normalized scale (higher is more open)

Intelligence Index Comparisons

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Weighted average cost (USD) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task

Most attractive quadrant

Pareto line

Cost

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Weighted average cost (USD) per Intelligence Index task · Segmented by token type · Lower is better

No publicly available API

Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Cost (USD) to run all evaluations in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

No publicly available API

The cost to run the evaluations in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, calculated using the model's input, cache hit, cache write, reasoning, and answer token prices and the number of tokens used across evaluations (excluding repeats).

Pricing: Cache Hit, Input, and Output

Price (USD per M Tokens)

No publicly available API

Price per token for cached prompts (previously processed), typically offering a significant discount compared to regular input price, represented as USD per million tokens. The values shown here are the cache hit price; cache write and cache storage are billed separately and vary by provider — see "Cache pricing by provider" for detail.

Context Window

Context window: tokens limit · Higher is better

No publicly available API

Larger context windows are relevant to RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) LLM workflows which typically involve reasoning and information retrieval of large amounts of data.

Maximum number of combined input & output tokens. Output tokens commonly have a significantly lower limit (varied by model).

Speed

Measured by Output Speed (tokens per second)

Output Speed

Output tokens per second · Higher is better

No publicly available API

Tokens per second received while the model is generating tokens (ie. after first chunk has been received from the API for models which support streaming).

Figures represent performance of the model's first-party API or the median across providers where a first-party API is not available.

Time per Intelligence Index Task

Weighted average decode time (minutes) per Intelligence Index task · Excludes TTFT and overhead time · Lower is better

No publicly available API

The weighted average time (seconds) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task. This is calculated by dividing output tokens per task by output speed, weighted by the relative weights of each benchmark in the Intelligence Index.

Latency

Measured by Time (seconds) to First Token

Latency: Time To First Answer Token

Seconds to first answer token received · Accounts for reasoning model 'thinking' time

No publicly available API

Time to first answer token received, in seconds, after API request sent. For reasoning models, this includes the 'thinking' time of the model before providing an answer. For models which do not support streaming, this represents time to receive the completion.

End-to-End Response Time

Seconds to output 500 tokens, calculated based on time to first token, 'thinking' time for reasoning models, and output speed

End-to-End Response Time

Seconds to output 500 tokens, including reasoning model 'thinking' time · Lower is better

No publicly available API

Seconds to receive a 500 token response. Key components:

Input time: Time to receive the first response token
Thinking time (only for reasoning models): Time reasoning models spend outputting tokens to reason prior to providing an answer. Amount of tokens based on the average reasoning tokens across a diverse set of 60 prompts (methodology details).
Answer time: Time to generate 500 output tokens, based on output speed

Figures represent performance of the model's first-party API or the median across providers where a first-party API is not available.

Model Size (Open Weights Models Only)

Model Size: Total and Active Parameters

Comparison between total model parameters and parameters active during inference (billions)

The total number of trainable weights and biases in the model, expressed in billions. These parameters are learned during training and determine the model's ability to process and generate responses.

The number of parameters actually executed during each inference forward pass, expressed in billions. For Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, a routing mechanism selects a subset of experts per token, resulting in fewer active than total parameters. Dense models use all parameters, so active equals total.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about gpt-oss-20b (Low)

gpt-oss-20b (Low) was released on August 5, 2025.

gpt-oss-20b (Low) was created by OpenAI.

gpt-oss-20b (Low) generates output at 216.7 tokens per second (based on the median across providers serving the model), which is well above average compared to other open weight models of similar size (median: 86.7 t/s).

gpt-oss-20b (Low) has a time to first token (TTFT) of 0.80s (based on the median across providers serving the model), which is very competitive compared to other open weight models of similar size (median: 1.09s).

gpt-oss-20b (Low) costs $0.07 per 1M input tokens (better than average, median: $0.12) and $0.30 per 1M output tokens (better than average, median: $0.30), based on the median across providers serving the model.

gpt-oss-20b (Low) costs $0.07 per 1M input tokens and $0.30 per 1M output tokens (based on the median across providers serving the model). For a blended rate (7:2:1 cache hit/input/output ratio), this is $0.09 per 1M tokens. Pricing may vary by provider. Compare provider pricing

Yes, gpt-oss-20b (Low) is a reasoning model. It uses extended thinking or chain-of-thought reasoning to work through complex problems before providing an answer.

gpt-oss-20b (Low) supports text input.

gpt-oss-20b (Low) supports text output.

No, gpt-oss-20b (Low) does not support image input. It can only process text.

No, gpt-oss-20b (Low) is not multimodal. It only supports text input.

gpt-oss-20b (Low) has a context window of 130k tokens. This determines how much text and conversation history the model can process in a single request.

Yes, gpt-oss-20b (Low) is open weights. The model weights are publicly available and can be downloaded for self-hosting.

gpt-oss-20b (Low) has 21 billion parameters (3.6 billion active).

gpt-oss-20b (Low) is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model with 21 billion total parameters, but only 3.6 billion active parameters are used during inference.

gpt-oss-20b (Low) is released under the Apache 2.0 license. This license allows commercial use. View license

gpt-oss-20b (Low) has a knowledge cutoff of May 2024. The model's training data includes information up to this date.

Yes, gpt-oss-20b (Low) is available via API through 3 providers. Compare API providers

gpt-oss-20b (Low) is available through 3 API providers. Compare providers

gpt-oss-20b (Low) Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis

Model summary

IntelligenceUpdated

Speed

Cost

Verbosity

Comparison Summary

Technical specifications

143 models in this class

Intelligence

Speed

Cost per Task

IntelligenceUpdated

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index by Open Weights / Proprietary

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Open Weights

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Benchmarks

Evaluations

Intelligence Evaluation Relevance

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Openness Index

Artificial Analysis Openness Index: Score

Intelligence Index Comparisons

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Cost

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Pricing: Cache Hit, Input, and Output

Cache Hit

Context Window

Context Window

Context Window for RAG

Context Window

Speed

Output Speed

Output Speed

Model Performance Representation

Time per Intelligence Index Task

Time per Intelligence Index Task

Latency

Latency: Time To First Answer Token

Time to First Answer Token

End-to-End Response Time

End-to-End Response Time

End-to-End Response Time

Model Performance Representation

Model Size (Open Weights Models Only)

Model Size: Total and Active Parameters

Total Parameters

Active Parameters at Inference Time

Frequently Asked Questions

When was gpt-oss-20b (Low) released?

Who created gpt-oss-20b (Low)?

How fast is gpt-oss-20b (Low)?

What is the latency of gpt-oss-20b (Low)?

How much does gpt-oss-20b (Low) cost?

What is gpt-oss-20b (Low) API pricing?

Is gpt-oss-20b (Low) a reasoning model?

What input modalities does gpt-oss-20b (Low) support?

What output modalities does gpt-oss-20b (Low) support?

Can gpt-oss-20b (Low) process images?

Is gpt-oss-20b (Low) multimodal?

What is the context window of gpt-oss-20b (Low)?

Is gpt-oss-20b (Low) open source?

How many parameters does gpt-oss-20b (Low) have?

What are the active parameters of gpt-oss-20b (Low)?

What is the license for gpt-oss-20b (Low)?

What is the knowledge cutoff date for gpt-oss-20b (Low)?

Is gpt-oss-20b (Low) available via API?

Where can I use gpt-oss-20b (Low)?