The Gist

  • OpenAI releases developer APIs. Available for ChatGPT and Whisper AI models.
  • ChatGPT costs reduced by 90%. API users will benefit.
  • Developers can improve applications. With natural language processing capabilities and added chatbot functionality.

Developers can now integrate OpenAI's advanced tech into their own applications with Wednesday’s release of developer APIs for ChatGPT and Whisper AI models.

According to company officials, through a series of systemwide optimizations, they’ve reduced ChatGPT costs by 90% since December, allowing them to “pass the savings” on to API users. By integrating the ChatGPT and Whisper APIs, developers can improve their applications natural language processing capabilities and add chatbot functionality.

ChatGPT is OpenAI’s wildly popular language model that generates articulate text, completes prompts, answers questions and produces paragraphs of copy that resemble human writing. Whisper is a speech-to-text model developed by OpenAI that can transcribe spoken audio into text.

“Developers can now use our open-source Whisper large-v2 model in the API with much faster and cost-effective results,” officials said in a statement. “ChatGPT API users can expect continuous model improvements and the option to choose dedicated capacity for deeper control over the models.”

The ChatGPT API model is the gpt-3.5-turbo. It’s priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens (750 words), which is about 10 times less expensive than existing GPT-3.5 models, according to OpenAI. Whisper — a model the company admits can be “hard to run” is now available through the API as a large-v2 model and priced at $0.006 per minute. It’s accessible through the company's transcriptions or translations and accepts formats that include m4a, mp3, mp4, mpeg, mpga, wav, webm.

Related Article: ChatGPT Is Already Replacing Humans in the Workplace

Learning Opportunities

What is an API?

Essentially APIs (application programming interfaces) are a set of protocols, routines and tools for building software and applications that provide a standardized way for different applications and systems to communicate with each other, allowing developers to access certain features or data, without having to understand how the application works internally.

APIs are a crucial component of modern software development, enabling the creation of more complex and feature-rich applications and can be found all around us, powering many of the services we use every day. Twitter and Facebook have APIs that allow developers to access data and functionality of these platforms. Google Maps has an API that allows developers to embed maps and location data into their own applications. Ecommerce platforms like Amazon and eBay also provide APIs that allow developers to access data related to products, sales and shipping.

Related Article: 4 Ways AI, Analytics and Machine Learning Are Improving Customer Service and Support

Early Adopters of the New API Tech

Snap Inc., the creator of Snapchat, is an early adopter of the OpenAI tech. The company integrated an advanced chatbot using ChatGPT API into its new My AI for Snapchat+, released this week. Other adopters include Quizlet, which is using ChatGPT API to launch Q-Chat, an AI tutor that presents students with adaptive questions based on relevant study materials, and Instacart is augmenting its app with ChatGPT.

“We believe that AI can provide incredible opportunities and economic empowerment to everyone and the best way to achieve that is to allow everyone to build with it,” company officials said. “We hope that the changes we announced today will lead to numerous applications that everyone can benefit from.” 

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