OpenAI launches API for ChatGPT and Whisper to enable integration into third-party software

OpenAI has announced that it’s now letting third-party developers integrate ChatGPT – its chatbot model and Whisper – its transcription and translation model, into their apps and services via an API.

The ChatGPT creator which grew to an estimated 100 million monthly active users in 3 months and attracted major media attention, announced on its website that the "ChatGPT and Whisper models are now available on our API, giving developers access to cutting-edge language (not just chat!) and speech-to-text capabilities."

While several developers have come up with workarounds to include chat services in their apps, the introduction of the official ChatGPT API is set to ease the bottleneck of accessibility and expand the reach of the AI technology to many more companies struggling with an in-house AI chatbot model.

Companies or developers using the ChatGPT API for their operations would be charged 1,000 tokens for $0.002, about 750 words (“Tokens” are the blocks of text that the system breaks sentences and words into in order to predict what text it should output next.), which the company says is “10x cheaper than our existing GPT-3.5 models,” the version which originally powered ChatGPT.

Some major companies have already implemented the ChatGPT API including Snapchat, which introduced its My AI feature built on the API model for Snapchat+ this week. Other early adopters are Shopify, Instacart and Quizlet.

With this new release, OpenAI continues to expand its footprint in the generative AI landscape which is expected to grow from $8.65 billion in 2022 to reach $188.62 billion by 2032, according to Brainy Insights, where other big techs including the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta are ramping up to perfect their own advanced AI systems.