It’s Christmas in August – at least, for those tech-wonks who are interested in new model releases. Today’s news is a very full stocking of brand new LLM editions from three of the biggies – OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

OpenAI’s new algorithms, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, are available under an open-source license. Anthropic, for its part, released an upgraded version of its proprietary Claude Opus 4 large language model. The update improves upon the LLM’s coding capabilities, which the company claims already outperformed the competition.

To understand why this is such a big deal, it helps to understand the difference between closed models and open models. Closed models, such as OpenAI’s o models or Anthropic’s