New OpenAI API like Algolia, Quizlet, and Reddit

We’re releasing an API for accessing new AI models developed by OpenAI. Unlike most AI systems which are designed for one use-case, the API today provides a general-purpose “text in, text out” interface, allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task. You can now request access in order to integrate the API into your product, develop an entirely new application, or help us explore the strengths and limits of this technology.

Given any text prompt, the API will return a text completion, attempting to match the pattern you gave it. You can “program” it by showing it just a few examples of what you’d like it to do; its success generally varies depending on how complex the task is. The API also allows you to hone performance on specific tasks by training on a dataset (small or large) of examples you provide, or by learning from human feedback provided by users or labelers.

We’ve designed the API to be both simple for anyone to use but also flexible enough to make machine learning teams more productive. In fact, many of our teams are now using the API so that they can focus on machine learning research rather than distributed systems problems. Today the API runs models with weights from the GPT-3 family with many speed and throughput improvements. Machine learning is moving very fast, and we’re constantly upgrading our technology so that our users stay up to date.

The field’s pace of progress means that there are frequently surprising new applications of AI, both positive and negative. We will terminate API access for obviously harmful use-cases, such as harassment, spam, radicalization, or astroturfing. But we also know we can’t anticipate all of the possible consequences of this technology, so we are launching today in a private beta rather than general availability, building tools to help users better control the content our API returns, and researching safety-relevant aspects of language technology (such as analyzing, mitigating, and intervening on harmful bias). We’ll share what we learn so that our users and the broader community can build more human-positive AI systems.

In addition to being a revenue source to help us cover costs in pursuit of our mission, the API has pushed us to sharpen our focus on general-purpose AI technology—advancing the technology, making it usable, and considering its impacts in the real world. We hope that the API will greatly lower the barrier to producing beneficial AI-powered products, resulting in tools and services that are hard to imagine today.

Interested in exploring the API? Join companies like Algolia, Quizlet, and Reddit, and researchers at institutions like the Middlebury Institute in our private beta.