What's up: What should be top-of-mind for CIOs considering OpenAI's new models; Palantir wins Washington; chipmaker AMD logs higher profit.

Good morning. OpenAI on Tuesday announced the release of two new open-weight models, called gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. The San Francisco-based company said the models “outperform” similarly sized open models on reasoning tasks.

The new models represent somewhat of a departure for OpenAI, which has chosen not to release the “weights” behind its models for the past several years, making them “closed” or proprietary instead.

To allow customers to actually run the models, OpenAI said it partnered with cloud platforms including Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services, and AI inference providers including the startup Baseten. 

The WSJ Leadership Institute talked with two of OpenAI’s partners on what should be top-of-mind for CIOs. More below. 

Particularly, they're great for building agentic apps because they have good reasoning capabilities. And because they have open-weights—until now OpenAI's models were closed weights—that means customers can do sophisticated customization.

Historically, with a lot of OpenAI's models, the “chain-of-thought” was not visible to customers. With these open-weight models, customers can now see a lot of those intermediate steps as they're happening. That helps customers analyze how the model actually got to the answer.

WSJLI: How should CIOs and CTOs be thinking about OpenAI’s new open-weight models? 

Deo: Most CIOs today are already in that mode where they know there is going to be a latest and greatest model coming out, and they have to continuously evaluate what makes most sense.

It's not a question of whether they should, I think they know that models have to be replaced.

We expect this pace of innovation to continue at least for a while. CIOs will be, at this point, attuned to the fact that they have to adapt and evaluate and explore every best option. Because their competitors are doing that, because everybody wants to deliver exceptional experiences for their customers.

WSJLI: What are some of the trade-offs technology leaders should consider when deciding to use open-weight models versus proprietary models?

Deo: If you use the open-weight model in an out-of-the-box manner, I think there is not much difference between open-weight models and closed-weight models.

The advantage is you can actually adapt the performance—both the speed of responses and also the accuracy of responses. With closed-weight models you can do that, but the knobs and levers are limited, generally. You can adapt the accuracy, but you don’t have any control on the performance.

When customers think about open models, they also look at the license terms. Basically, the license terms have to be generous and permissive. That can sometimes be a factor on whether they pick an open model or not.

Tuhin Srivastava, CEO and co-founder of AI inference startup Baseten and his team were launch partners with OpenAI for its new open-weight  models, allowing the startup to have an early look at the new open-weight models.

Here’s what he had to say about how the new models stack up against other open-weight models, and what businesses should consider when it comes to choosing or switching between them.

How Palantir won over Washington. The onetime Silicon Valley upstart has emerged as a power player in Trump’s second term, leaning hard into the president’s America-first agenda and landing contracts with a host of agencies including the Pentagon and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

The data-management company received more than $322 million from government contracts in the first six months of 2025.

Leaning too hard? The WSJ reports that some former employees have said they viewed the company’s assistance on Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement as potentially eroding the company’s own civil-liberties policies. Meanwhile some current and former Pentagon officials said they worried about becoming overdependent on a single contractor

On Monday, Palantir reported its best-ever earnings with more than $1 billion in revenue in the second quarter

Advanced Micro Devices logged an increase in profit and sales for its latest quarter on record server and PC processor sales. The Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker on Tuesday posted a profit of $872 million, compared with $265 million a year earlier. Revenue rose 32% to $7.69 billion. 

Super Micro Computer missed Wall Street estimates in its fiscal fourth quarter, but guided for revenue to surpass expectations in the new fiscal year. The server and storage provider on Tuesday posted a profit of $195.2 million in the quarter ended June 30, compared with $297.2 million a year earlier, WSJ reports.

A recent breach of Columbia University’s computer systems compromised not only names and university-issued identification numbers, but also bank account and routing numbers, student loan disbursements, test scores and home addresses, Bloomberg reports. A Columbia spokesperson said the investigation is ongoing.

Weeks after stepping down as CEO of social-media platform X, Linda Yaccarino is becoming chief executive of eMed Population Health, a privately held health-management company.

Agencies across the federal government will now be able to buy certain artificial intelligence products from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, the General Services Administration announced Tuesday in the agency’s latest embrace of automation tools in government, FedScoop reports.

Sweden Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s admission in business newspaper Dagens industri that he uses ChatGPT “quite often” stirred up a bit of controversy with some citizens saying his use posed a security risk. It was enough for a spokesperson to counter such claims, saying AI was used “more as a ballpark,” Guardian reports.

The Justice Department says two Chinese nationals operating out of a company in El Monte, Calif. were arrested this week on charges they sent advanced Nvidia AI chips to China without authorization, Bloomberg reports. 

New data showed the trade deficit narrowing in June, to the lowest level since September 2023. Economists said that appeared to be mostly a reversal of the huge import surge before tariffs hit, rather than a sign of a sustained downward trend in the trade deficit. (WSJ)

The National Football League has struck a wide-reaching deal with Disney in which it will take a 10% stake in the ESPN sports empire in return for control of key media assets including NFL Network. (WSJ)

The Trump administration’s war on EVs will allow the auto industry to keep selling big, gas-powered vehicles for the foreseeable future. Detroit is thrilled. (WSJ)

Police had twice visited the home of the gunman who killed four people in a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper in recent years over fears he was armed and suicidal, according to criminal records including 911 calls and body-camera footage. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.