Oumi Launch Brings An Open-Source AI Platform To Help Build Next DeepSeek

“Imagine a world without electricity, cars, computers, the internet — a truly bleak place. Or one where each of these things are owned and controlled by one company. That's what our world would look like today if the human knowledge that brought about these innovations had been locked away, never shared openly.”

This is how Oumi’s latest blog post begins. The blog talks about the importance of complete open-source platforms for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Titled “If AI Isn't Truly Open, It Will Fail Us”, the blog calls for AI to have its “Linux moment”, which provided the world with a completely open-source platform that possessed all the required development tools.

In this case, having open models developed in silos by the likes of Meta, DeepSeek, Alibaba, etc. won’t do much good. It needs

This is what Oumi is bringing to the world.

In a press release published shortly before the blog post, Oumi announced itself—that is it announced the launch of its open AI platform.

Oumi is the world’s first unconditionally complete AI platform that unites AI researchers and developers globally, allowing them to collaborate, experiment, and build together the world's largest state-of-the-art open-source laboratory.

Oumi enables open collaboration, which paves the way for thousands of researchers, developers, and AI experts to work together to collectively and responsibly advance AI.

This makes it the first platform to offer researchers and developers state-of-the-art foundation models with open code, open data, open weights, and open collaboration.

The platform allows developers to train and fine-tune models from 10M (million) to 405B (billion) parameters using state-of-the-art techniques such as SFT, LoRA, QLoRA, DPO, and more.

Additionally, they can work with text and multimodal models such as Llama, Qwen, Phi, and others; synthesize and curate training data; efficiently deploy and evaluate models; leverage open models and commercial APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Vertex AI, Parasail, etc. through integrations; and run their models from anywhere—from laptops to clusters to clouds.


Oumi enters the AI arena as a Public Benefit Corporation. The company also announced it received $10 million in Seed funding, in a round that was led by Venrock and Obvious Ventures with contributions from Plug & Play and Ascend.

Ganesh Srinivasan, Partner at Venrock, said, “There hasn't been enough focus on open experimentation to collectively push the boundaries of what AI can do. With an unconditionally open source platform, we won't cap our talent, we will foster experimentation, and society will reap the benefits.”

Oumi was created by ex-Google and ex-Apple engineers, in collaboration with researchers from 13 leading research universities.

These include Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, New York University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California (Berkeley), the University of Washington, and the University of Waterloo.

Ahead of this, researchers and developers interested in contributing can join the Oumi community.


The ideals expressed in the blog post were reflected by Oumi’s CEO and Co-founder Manos Koukoumidis, who said, “AI needs its Linux. The greatest technology innovations are developed in the open. We must open AI up to the open source community to advance it collectively and responsibly. To make it accessible to everyone.”

Koukoumidis was a Senior Engineering Manager at Google Cloud AI who played a foundational role in the development of Google Cloud’s PaLM (Pathways Language Model).

According to Oussama Elachqar, another Co-founder of Oumi and previously a Machine Learning Engineer at Apple, “Our vision with Oumi is to free the AI talent locked in silos and make AI the ultimate team sport.”

“Giving AI talent a platform where they can work collectively will accelerate progress and speed of discovery in every area of AI. We have incredibly talented and bright developers and researchers in AI working in silos. If we unite them, we will get further, faster."


The move comes as profit-focused OpenAI found itself being challenged  by open-source DeepSeek, as the latter announced a new AI model called R1 that performed at par with OpenAI’s most advanced model.

Moreover, the company claims to have built its AI model in around 2 months, using lower-powered GPUs, and for a fraction of the cost it took other leading AI platforms. The revelation also led to major tech conglomerates taking a beating in the share market, with NVIDIA losing around $600 billion in market capitalization in one day.

Do you think an open ecosystem will be better for the development of AI technology?

Do you think leading AI companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and others should collaborate and develop industry standards that govern the future of AI development?

Let us know in the comments below!