OpenAI: gpt-oss-20b (free)
The free tier of gpt-oss-20b shows some strong individual benchmark scores (notably in math and coding throughput) but its overall intelligence index sits in the limited range, making it best suited for lighter tasks where cost is the primary concern.
Assessment date: March 14, 2026
Our methodology takes into account a range of factors including pricing, functionality, capabilities, benchmark performance, and real-world applicability. Rankings are reviewed and updated regularly as new models are released. Issues with our rankings? Contact us
gpt-oss-20b is an open-weight 21B parameter model released by OpenAI under the Apache 2.0 license. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 3.6B active parameters per forward pass, optimized for lower-latency inference and deployability on consumer or single-GPU hardware. The model is trained in OpenAI’s Harmony response format and supports reasoning level configuration, fine-tuning, and agentic capabilities including function calling, tool use, and structured outputs.
Capabilities
Architecture
| Modality | Text → Text |
| Tokenizer | GPT |
| Parameters | 20B |
Performance Indices
Source: Artificial Analysis
Benchmark Scores
Evaluations
Benchmark data from Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face
Model Information
Live Performance
Live endpoint metrics — refreshed every 30 minutes.
