Credit: VentureBeat made with Midjourney

OpenAI today announced on its developer-focused account on the social network X that third-party software developers outside the company can now access reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) for its new o4-mini language reasoning model, enabling them to customize a new, private version of it based on their enterprise’s unique products, internal terminology, goals, employees, processes, and more.

Essentially, this capability lets developers take the model available to the general public and tweak it to better fit their needs using OpenAI’s platform dashboard.

Then, they can deploy it through OpenAI’s application programming interface (API), another part of its developer platform, and connect it to their internal employee computers, databases, and applications.

Once deployed, if an employee or leader at the company wants to use it through a custom internal chatbot or custom OpenAI GPT to pull up private, proprietary company knowledge; or to answer specific questions about company products and policies; or generate new communications and collateral in the company’s voice, they can do so more easily with their RFT version of the model.

However, one cautionary note: research has shown that