gpt-oss-20b
A solid pick for self-hosting and full data control.
Overview
gpt-oss-20b is OpenAI's smaller open-weight model, released under Apache 2.0, with 21 billion parameters but only 3.6 billion active thanks to a MoE architecture quantized in MXFP4, letting it run within just 16GB of memory. It's solid at agentic tasks—function calling, web browsing, code execution—and offers three adjustable reasoning levels. The real catch: it only works reliably with OpenAI's harmony response format, which locks you into a specific inference pipeline. Its open weights and light hardware footprint make it a credible pick for on-premise deployment in Europe, without relying on a US cloud.
Skill profile
Not disclosed
Three independent measures
What people prefer, what the model can do, what the market uses. Each source has its biases and none is enough on its own: we show them side by side, never blended.
Strengths
- Open-source and self-hostable
Limitations
- API pricing not disclosed
Who is it for
- you want to control cost or self-host
- your data must stay in the EU
Ideal use cases
- Local enterprise assistants
- Function-calling agents
- Rapid on-device prototyping
- Custom fine-tuning projects
- DevOps task automation
Access & availability
Key specifications
What it costs per month
Estimate from sourced API prices and a hardware tier for self-hosting. Assumptions are editable.
Assumptions: 36-month amortisation, 0.25 €/kWh, 22 days/month, 1 $ = 0.92 €. Excludes labour, software licences, redundancy.
nAIvigate Trust Index
What the vendor offers and documents for professional use in Europe. An undocumented criterion counts as zero and stays visible: the score rises when the vendor publishes, not when we assume.
19/19 criteria documented · 100 % · 12 of them set by rule
See the criteria▾
Trust Index badge
Show this score in your docs, README or security page. It updates automatically.
[](https://naivigate.com/en/model/gpt-oss-20b)Data & compliance
What we know, line by line, with source and date. These lines feed the Data and Enterprise families of the Trust Index above. GDPR compliance depends on your processing, not on the model alone.
| EU data residency | Yes |
| Data processing agreement (DPA) | N/A· self-hosted: data never leaves |
| Transfer outside the EU | No |
| Training on your data | No |
| Configurable retention | N/A· self-hosted: data never leaves |
| Zero Data Retention | N/A· self-hosted: data never leaves |
| Self-hostable | Yes |
| Declared hosting | self |
Quality of this card’s data
This score measures the quality of the data on this card: price, context, Elo, licence, documented, sourced and fresh. It measures neither the model nor its compliance: for that, see the Trust Index above.
6/8 documented · 2/8 primary sources
Run it locally
Deploy
Copy-ready commands generated from this card. Adjust context length and GPU count to your hardware.
Easiest way to try it on a workstation. Install Ollama, then:
ollama run gpt-oss:20bAdvanced data · for expertsArchitecture, modalities, detailed cost, full benchmarks▾
| Arena Elo | 1317 |
| MMLU | — |
| GPQA | — |
| HumanEval | — |
| SWE-Bench | — |
| MATH | — |