From GPT-2 to gpt-oss: Analyzing the Architectural Advances

OpenAI released gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, their first open-weight models since GPT-2 in 2019, with architectural changes enabling single-GPU deployment via MXFP4 quantization. Sebastian Raschka provides a technical deep-dive comparing the architecture to GPT-2 and Qwen3, covering attention bias/sinks, width vs depth trade-offs, and benchmarks against GPT-5. The release marks a significant shift in OpenAI's openness strategy and is practically relevant for engineers who want to run capable models locally.