OpenAI is now allowing all third-party developers to access its APIs for its very popular ChatGPT chatbot AI. The announcement today means we could see an explosion of chatbot AIs using ChatGPT in online apps and services.
It also means that OpenAI can make some money from ChatGPT aside from its recent ChatGPT Plus subscription model. Here are the details:
The ChatGPT model family we are releasing today, gpt-3.5-turbo, is the same model used in the ChatGPT product. It is priced at $0.002 per 1k tokens, which is 10x cheaper than our existing GPT-3.5 models. It’s also our best model for many non-chat use cases—we’ve seen early testers migrate from text-davinci-003 to gpt-3.5-turbo with only a small amount of adjustment needed to their prompts.
The company added that it has seen a “90% cost reduction” for its ChatGPT software since the month of December 2022. There’s been some concerns that operating chatbots will cost companies a lot more money compared to traditional search engine products.
Some third parties have already received early access to the APIs. That includes Snap, who announced earlier this week it was adding the My AI chatbot for users of its Snapchat+ service. Other companies like Instacart and Shopify have also added the same APIs into their products.
In addition, OpenAI is letting developers access version 2 of its Whisper API. It’s a text-to-speech generator that works in multiple languages and voice file formats, and also handles translations. It will be priced at $0.006 per minute.