Calculated
Calculated from a published parameter count. Every model on this site is calculated the
same way, so the comparison holds even where the absolute value carries uncertainty.
Our figures are good to roughly a factor of two to three, which is why we only ever
state a difference of 5× or more.
The figure above is an understatement. gpt-oss-20b generates reasoning text you never see, and that text costs energy to produce. Our calculation counts a fixed answer length, so the real figure is higher — we cannot say by how much, because the amount is not published.
Is there a better choice?
A lighter model that does the job
Nothing we track is both at least as capable as gpt-oss-20b and meaningfully lighter. On our figures this is already a sensible choice for its standard of work.
What OpenAI publishes
Energy cannot be worked out without knowing how big a model is. Of the 31 models
from OpenAI that we track, 24 can be assessed at all — the rest publish
too little for anyone outside the company to calculate anything.