Harmony: OpenAI's response format for its open-weight model series
53 comments
·August 5, 2025irthomasthomas
nxobject
Computer science's favorite move: we've reached the limits of a scaling law meant to benefit single-threaded processes, so let's go parallel...
mindwok
This is what Grok 4 Heavy does with apparent success.
irthomasthomas
They may have been inspired by it. It was shared by karpathy... https://x.com/karpathy/status/1870692546969735361
I wish someone would extract the Grok Heavy prompts to confirm, but I guess those jailbreakers don't have the $200 sub.
Imustaskforhelp
What are your thoughts on some other model like qwen using something like this?
Pardon me but are you thinking that this method is superior than mixture of experts? What are your thoughts?
irthomasthomas
I tested a consortium of qwens on the brainfuck test and it solved it, while the single models fail.
MOEs are a single model. An 'expert' is a subset of layers chosen by a router model for each token. This makes them run faster. A consortium is a type of parallel reasoning that uses multiple of the same or different models to generate parallel response and find the best one.
All models have a jagged frontier with weird skill gaps. A consortium can bridge those gaps and increase performance on the frontier.
onlyrealcuzzo
Has anyone compared a consortium of leading edge 3B-20B models compared to the most powerful models?
I'd love to see how they performed.
lajr
This format, or similar formats, seem to be the standard now, I was just reading the "Lessons from Building Manus"[1] post and they discuss the Hermes Format[2] which seems similar in terms of being pseudo-xml.
My initial thought was how hacky the whole thing feels, but then the fact that it works and gives rise to complex behaviour (like coercing specific tool selection in the Manus post) is quite simple and elegant.
Also as an aside, it is good that it appears that each standard tag is a single token in the OpenAI repo.
[1] https://manus.im/blog/Context-Engineering-for-AI-Agents-Less... [2] https://github.com/NousResearch/Hermes-Function-Calling
accrual
> The format enables the model to output to multiple different channels for chain of thought, and tool calling preambles along with regular responses
That's pretty cool and seems like a logical next step to structure AI outputs. We started out with a stream of plaintext. In the future perhaps we'll have complex typed output.
Humans also emit many channels of information simutaneously. Our speech, tone of voice, body language, our appearance - it all has an impact on how our information is received by another.
citizensinan
Same here - all those links are either broken or asking for auth. Classic case of announcing something before the infrastructure is ready.
This kind of coordination failure is surprisingly common with AI releases lately. Remember when everyone was trying to access GPT-4 on launch day? Or when Anthropic's Claude had those random outages during their big announcements?
Makes you wonder if they're rushing to counter Google's Genie 3 news and got caught with their pants down during the GitHub outage. The timing seems too coincidental.
At least when it does go live, having truly open weights models will be huge for the community. Just wish they'd test their deployment pipeline before hitting 'publish' on the blog post.
dr_dshiv
Yesterday I gave a presentation on the role of harmony in AI — as a matter of philosophical interest. I’d previously written a large literature review on the concept of harmony (here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240587262...). If you are curious about the slides, here: Bit.ly/ozora2025
I assume they are using the concept of harmony to refer to the consistent response format? Or is it their intention for an open weights release?
obviyus
Links seem to be working now:
- https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/
- https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/419b6906-9da6-406c-a19d-1bb078ac7...
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Scene_Cast2
I wonder how much performance is left on the table due to it not being zero-copy.
deckar01
gpt-oss models are reportedly being hosted on huggingface.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligenc...
bbor
(as of 3 days ago)
qsort
pelican when
righthand
I hope this ends in well poisoning to where all data about pelicans is associated with a bicycle in some way to which you can't get any model to give you correct information about pelicans or bicycles but you can get a pelican riding a bicycle.
MarcelOlsz
What's pelican?
HaZeust
wen pelican.... WEN BICYCLE
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jfoster
The page links to: https://gpt-oss.com/ and https://openai.com/open-models
... but these links aren't active yet. I presume they will be imminently, and I guess that means that OpenAI are releasing an open weights GPT model today?
Prediction: GPT-5 will use a consortium of models for parallel reasoning, possibly including their oss versions. Each using different 'channels' from the harmony spec.
I have a branch of llm-consortium where I was noodling with giving each member model a role. Only problem is it's expensive to evaluate these ideas so I put it on hold. But maybe now with oss models being cheap I can try and it on those.