Orange announced yesterday the integration of OpenAI's open-weight reasoning models gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b within its secure and sovereign infrastructure. This advancement follows an agreement concluded at the end of November 2024, which provided the telecom operator with early access to the cutting-edge AI models developed by the Californian company, thus placing Orange among the first global groups to deploy these technologies.
According to OpenAI, the performance of the gpt-oss-120b model approaches that of o4-mini on key reasoning evaluations, while being able to run on a single GPU with 80 GB of memory. The gpt-oss-20b model, on the other hand, shows results comparable to o3-mini and can run on devices with only 16 GB of memory, making it an ideal solution for local inference, rapid iteration, and deployments requiring minimal hardware investment.

A Sovereign AI Serving Territories

This collaboration is part of Orange's strategy to strengthen digital sovereignty through the local hosting of models in its data centers spread across 26 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This choice ensures not only the protection of sensitive data and compliance with local regulations but also performance optimization. Thanks to its expertise in AI engineering, Orange can adapt and distill these models to meet specific use cases. 
The operator can, for example:
  • improve customer experience via multilingual voice assistants and more responsive and accurate chatbots;
  • enhance the quality and resilience of its networks with sovereign AI models capable of diagnosing complex issues while ensuring the security of sensitive data;
  • develop tailored solutions for its clients, ranging from voice recognition services to secure data analysis,

Frugality and Energy Efficiency: The Pillars of Responsible AI

Orange adopts a "frugal" approach aiming to combine technological performance and reduction of environmental impact. By prioritizing the local execution of models, the company ensures direct control over energy consumption, contributing to the limitation of carbon emissions while optimizing resource use. A pragmatic approach that makes efficiency a strategic as well as an ethical challenge.

Africa at the Heart of Inclusive Deployment

Digital inclusivity and sustainable development of the African continent are pillars of the "Lead the future" plan launched in 2023 by Orange. Present in 18 countries where many dialects coexist, the operator places linguistic and cultural diversity at the center of its strategy.
The refined models will integrate regional languages to allow populations to communicate more naturally with support, sales, or marketing services. They will subsequently be made available as open source to local authorities who can use them for their public services.