In March, OpenAI officially launched the latest version of its ChatGPT AI technology, GPT-4. However, at that time it was only available for certain developers if they signed up for a waitlist. It was also available to ChatGPT Plus paid subscribers in a limited version. Of course, Microsoft’s own Bing Chat chatbot is run in part with GPT-4 as well.
Today, OpenAI revealed that GPT-4 is generally available for all developers who have paid API access. In a blog post, the company stated:
Today all existing API developers with a history of successful payments can access the GPT-4 API with 8K context. We plan to open up access to new developers by the end of this month, and then start raising rate-limits after that depending on compute availability.
The blog post added that OpenAI is making even more of its APIs generally available starting today. That includes GPT-3.5 Turbo, Whisper, and its DALL·E image generation API. Finally, the blog post said OpenAI is working on “enabling fine-tuning for GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo” and plans to offer those for developers later in 2023.
OpenAI also launched its Chat Completions API in March so developers could “build conversational experiences and a broad range of completion tasks” for ChatGPT. Now, Chat Completions takes up “97% of our API GPT usage.” As a result, it will retire some of its older models that use the older Completions API starting on January 4, 2024. It stated:
While this API will remain accessible, we will label it as “legacy” in our developer documentation starting today. We plan for future model and product improvements to focus on the Chat Completions API, and do not have plans to publicly release new models using the Completions API.
Developers who have been using a number of older ChatGPT embeddings models will need to switch to the current text-embedding-ada-002 model by January 4 as well.