It seems everyone is head down coding on open-ended tools / infra like langchain, vector DBs, or even ChatGPT itself.

I’m curious, how are businesses using LLMs? It seems for 99% of use cases building a smaller, focused model would be the best way to solve a real business problem.

Hey everyone! Been diving deeper into AI stuff, and lately I’m interested about OpenAI's APIs. Anyone else trying them out? How do you fit them in your projects?

Came across this course on using OpenAI to make AI products. Not sure if I wanna jump in.

Anyone checked out something similar? Worth it for someone who’s kinda already got a grip on the tech side? Any free/paid alternatives you know about?

Would love to hear what you guys think

I don't understand all these complaints about GPT-4 getting worse, that turn out to be about ChatGPT. ChatGPT isn't GPT-4. I can't even comprehend how people are using the ChatGPT interface for productivity things and work. Are you all just, like, copy/pasting your stuff into the browser, back and forth? How does that even work? Anyway, if you want any consistent behavior, use the damn API! The web interface is just a marketing tool, it is not the real product. Stop complaining it sucks, it is meant to. OpenAI was never expected to sustain the real GPT-4 performance for $20/mo, that's fairy tail. If you're using it for work, just pay for the real product and use the static API models. As a rule of thumb, pick gpt-4-1103-preview which is fast, good, cheap and has a 128K context. If you're rich and want slightly better IQ and instruction following, pick gpt-4-0314-32k. If you don't know how to use an API, just ask ChatGPT to teach you. That's all.

In online courses to learn about building LLM/ RAG apps using LlamaIndex and LangChain, instructors ask to use Open AI. But it seems, based on the error message that I get, that I need to enter my cc details to pay at least 5$ if not more to get more credits. Hence, I wonder if everyone is paying OpenAI while taking the courses or is there an online course for building LLM/RAG apps using ollama or alternatives.

Thank you in advance for your input!

I currently pay for pro because my needs are pretty simple. I just use it for help with work and some light coding projects I do from time to time.

I barely use it but when I do I usually get close to hitting the rate limit in the webUI. That might have changes since they just changed the limit I think but still the fact remains I used it 2-3 times a week for a few questions and then once very few months for a more complicated session. I was thinking I could save some money by just using the API.

I just setup a self hosted web interface to use with the API and threw in $20 and am going to test it this month to see if I top out my usage but it made me wonder maybe I can use a open source LLM. Not too sure how it works if I can train it myself on the reference material I would like it to help with. Mainly coding and scripting is what I use it for.

How I work. For coding projects I have GPT write almost all of the code. I do iterations see what works and what doesn’t then have it write the final application. I know how to code but GPT is just so much faster and it’s stupid imo to not just have it write the whole thing. I inevitably have to make tweaks and corrections but It works well enough for the type of projects I’m working on that are just for me. Not sure if any other language models can perform as well as GPT for coding. If there is one that is free or at least cheaper than $20 a month for the amount of usage I need then I’d love to hear about it.

I was looking to buy the open air API for my simple NLP classification problem.

Given the current price for chat gpt 4o 2.5$/1 M input tokens I have calculated that it would cost me less than 2$ a month to use the API?

My output is 3 class classification so the output cost is nearly next to nothing.

I feel like something is off..

Does anybody have any real life experience using their API?

Is there a guide on setting up the API (and a UI if available) to use chatgpt better for someone who isn’t tech savvy?

I keep seeing a lot of people saying “use the API if you want best results” “just use the API””stop complaining and use the api” but never link to a guide for those that don’t know. They just say “ask chatgpt”

I've been thinking about OpenAI's new Responses API, and I can't help but feel that it marks a significant shift in their approach, potentially moving toward a more closed, vendor-specific ecosystem.

References:

https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/responses

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/responses-vs-chat-completions

Context:

Until now, the Completions API was essentially a standard—stateless, straightforward, and easily replicated by local LLMs through inference engines like llama.cpp, ollama, or vLLM. While OpenAI has gradually added features like structured outputs and tools, these were still possible to emulate without major friction.

The Responses API, however, feels different. It introduces statefulness and broader functionalities that include conversation management, vector store handling, file search, and even web search. In essence, it's not just an LLM endpoint anymore—it's an integrated, end-to-end solution for building AI-powered systems.

Why I find this concerning:

1. Statefulness and Lock-In: Inference engines like vLLM are optimized for stateless inference. They are not tied to databases or persistent storage, making it difficult to replicate a stateful approach like the Responses API.

2. Beyond Just Inference: The integration of vector stores and external search capabilities means OpenAI's API is no longer a simple, isolated component. It becomes a broader AI platform, potentially discouraging open, interchangeable AI solutions.

3. Breaking the "Standard": Many open-source tools and libraries have built around the OpenAI API as a standard. If OpenAI starts deprecating the Completions API or nudging developers toward Responses, it could disrupt a lot of the existing ecosystem.

I understand that from a developer's perspective, the new API might simplify certain use cases, especially for those already building around OpenAI's ecosystem. But I also fear it might create a kind of "walled garden" that other LLM providers and open-source projects struggle to compete with.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you see this as a genuine risk to the open LLM ecosystem, or am I being too pessimistic?

I'm thinking of cancelling my ChatGPT subscription and using an API key instead. What are some of the best apps/tools you have found that use the API key?

So I've been working with OpenAI's API for a while now, and has anyone else noticed how it's basically turning into Langchain at this point? 😂

What started as a simple text-in, text-out API has exploded into this massive ecosystem:

• Embeddings

• Vector stores

• Real-time streaming

• Assistants API

• Agents API

• Web sockets

• Function calling

• Vision APIs

Don't get me wrong, all these features are powerful, but it's getting to the point where you need a PhD just to figure out which part of their API you should be using for your project.

Remember when we used to just import openai, set an API key, and call completion? Those were simpler times...

Now I'm wondering if I should even bother with third-party libraries anymore since OpenAI is just absorbing all their functionality anyway. Half expecting them to announce "OpenAI Chains" next week lol.

Anyone else feeling the feature bloat, or am I just being an old man yelling at clouds? What's your experience been like with all these new APIs?

Hey everyone,

I'm a college student working on a personal project and I think I might be able to use the OpenAI API to help me but I'm not sure if it's the best tool or how to use it properly.

I've written a script that scrapes my college's daily dining website and collects a list of all the dishes being served that day. The idea is that the user could enter some input like "protein, Asian" and the code could find the foods that best match the user's query, in this case, "egg fried rice" and "kung pao chicken." Or "vegetarian, healthy, breakfast" would output "overnight oats with blueberries."

OpenAI's API requires you to pay for it, but I don't really understand the pricing structure. if the cost is negligible then I don't mind paying it.

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!

Since OpenAI announced a ton of new API capabilities, the doors are open for lots of new product ideas and business models. I'm curious to discover use cases - what are you planning to build?

I recently set up an OpenAI account and set Mealie up with the API, I was wondering what other dockers I should look into that utilize the API.

Thanks!

I have begun trying to learn how to use the OpenAI API and also came across the assistants which seem very interesting. I'm having trouble learning how to use these tools simply using OpenAI's guides because I don't have experience with these tools, I have only completed a few computer science courses in college. For reference, I am currently following the quickstart tutorial, and I've set up my OpenAI environment with the key and have the python file to test but it is not running. I believe this is because I have to either buy credits or use the playground but I'm not sure how to use the playground.

Is there any good website/video or anything that can help learn how to use this correctly?

Hey all,

With recent updates from OpenAI, I'm a bit lost on which GPT API to use. Quality is key to my webapp, and currently I'm using GPT-4. But it's not cheap.

Is GPT-4 turbo cheaper, and does it maintain the level of quality? Any other suggestion?

Thanks in advance!

I scoured through but couldn't find a way to have users use their own key (without entering them of course). I know using my own key might get heavy on the bank. Here's what I've considered so far:

• Login with OpenAI authentication doesn't exist (similar to the "Login with Google/Facebook" auth) which could get the api key for any user.

• Even though I can include a Guid the API key being used is the same and there's no way to rate limit per user. Ideally I'm okay with rate limiting users to $5 worth of spend as a CAC.

• Afaik Azure OpenAI API doesn't provide the per user rate limit either and has a rate limit around the total usage of the API.

My options now are to host my own server and database and rate limit by user IPs. I'll need to take care of the overhead of things that could go wrong (someone IP switching and screwing up my credits, load balancing and rate limiting the backend server, someone using the API for their own use).

Is there any way around this?

After having worked with Anthropic API and Gemini 1.5 Pro & Flash APIs. OpenAI API seems to be the only reliable API service available.
With Anthropic - I am unable to add credits to their console, even after multiple mails to the customer support I have received no resolution. So I finally have to give up hope and just use Open AI.
With Google Gemini - The APIs are absolutely unreliable, you are not sure when the APIs will return an answer and when they will not. I keep encountering error from the API something like: StopCandidateException: finish_reason: RECITATION
So again no point in using Gemini, just switch to Open AI.

Hoping this experience will benefit the community.

Anyone else having these issues.

Hi! I am currently using Openai for our python project, but I can't find free model. Using the chat.openai.com I see that chatGpt 3.5 is free but using the API needs to be paid.

Is there any alternative? I am looking for an AI free for python, that could summarize a text conversation for me.