Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
If you were wondering what the difference between ChatGPT and GPT API was, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
With the recent launches (GPT-4 and ChatGPT Plus) from OpenAI all eyes have turned to their chatbots and what they can do. Particularly interesting are the API versions of ChatGPT and GPT-4. GPT-4 API is yet to release, but GPT API has been out for a while and was specifically designed with business in mind. But what does that mean in reality?
Let’s have a look.
Jasper AI
Copy AI
Originality AI detector
ChatGPT vs GPT API – what are the differences?
The overall differences between ChatGPT and GPT API are that GPT API was designed for use by businesses and its features reflect that.
Read More: How to join GPT-4 waitlist for ChatGPT & GPT API?
Here are our top three API features that you don’t get with the ChatGPT model:
1. Integration of the Whisper model
The Whisper model is a speech-to-text model in its Beta version right now. OpenAI claims to have trained the model on 680,000 hours of multilingual data. Using the Whisper model a whole host of speech in a myriad of accents and languages can dictate to the OpenAI API and immediately produce a transcript.
OpenAI even claim that the new beta Whisper model can receive dictation in one language and produce a corresponding transpiration in English with high accuracy.
2. Project incubation
The next on our list of top three API features that you don’t get with just the ChatGPT model is the capacity to incubate a project in the Playground.
(In addition to the service itself, OpenAI have produced a massive document detailing a massive amount of information on how to use the GPT API. This ranges from a quick overview to specific usage examples, to a ‘Production best practices section‘. For anyone looking into using the GPT API, we really recommend checking it out. Here’s the link.)
Within the Production best practices section, is a section titled ‘Staging accounts‘. Within it, OpenAI suggest that you may wish to access GPT API using two separate email accounts (which will create two disparate businesses) to keep your staging and production pages separate. This will allow you to muck around with your development pages and processes as much as you want without worrying about affecting your production pages being affected.
This is a really interesting and helpful tool for businesses, particularly when combined with the readers and owners settings. The key difference between these is that readers can only ‘view basic organization information’ and ‘make API requests‘, while owners have much more control. Owners can manage who is a reader/owner, and view and change the billing information. If you have a production or staging page that multiple readers can see this can provide a really valuable collaboration space, that can be accessed again and again and incubate within the Playground area.
3. Fine-tuning
The last of our top three API specific features is the variety of fine-tuning models available to run with the API. These help you to train the API to much more specific responses than you would get with the minimal training opportunities provided by ChatGPT. Using the fine-tuning models also allows you to save on tokens, which is always a plus.
The fine-tuning models available at the time of writing are:
Fine-tuning is really helpful to make sure your model is working to your standards. An example of fine-tuning that OpenAI provides for their API included sentiment analysis. Furthermore, you can check that ‘conditional generation’ is working correctly using fine tuning. An example provided by OpenAI that their API can help you with is making sure that a customer support chatbot is functioning correctly.
Fine-tuning, isn’t even a one-time process. If you receive new data that you would like to pass through the fine-tuning processes you can build on initial results and continue fine-tuning until you are satisfied with the model.
An honorable mention must also go to the Embeddings feature included in the OpenAI API. Embeddings are used to check that your text and data is all relevant to itself. So if that’s something your business is interested in, GPT API has some great features like Clustering, Recommendation and Classification, to name a few.
These are just our top three features. For the full break-down of all the API features, how to use them, and how to get the most out of them, head over to OpenAI’s dedicated page.
ChatGPT vs GPT API – what are the similarities?
Now let’s get onto what are the similarities between ChatGPT and GPT API. We found two main similarities. Here they are:
1. Content generation
The main take away we found, is that all the content generation that ChatGPT can do, so can GPT API. This includes writing tasks, summarising data, and assisting with coding.
Read More: Best ChatGPT prompts for writing (academic, copy, scriptwriting)
2. Access limitations
Similarly, ChatGPT and GPT API are very popular tools so both have failsafes in place that make sure that the server does not crash. For ChatGPT this means occasionally blocking access to ChatGPT until traffic calms down. To bypass this, OpenAI have released ChatGPT Plus which is a paid subscriber service offering unlimited access to ChatGPT.
For GPT API, there are rate limits in place which operate on a token allowance basis. Similar, to ChatGPT there is a way to bypass this. You can request an increase in rate limit, which OpenAI will review and either grant or deny based on the reasoning you provide.
In conclusion, ChatGPT and GPT API are different in that GPT API was specifically designed with businesses in mind and the features offered reflect that. However, there is little that ChatGPT does that GPT API cannot also achieve.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does GPT have an API?
Yes, ChatGPT has an API provided by OpenAI. Similarly, GPT-4 has an API version that you can sign up to the waitlist for.
Is OpenAI API free?
The OpenAI API operates on a token system which has a variety of pricing options. These range from $0.0004/1K tokens using Ada, to $0.0200/1K tokens using Davinci. There is a full break-down of the pricing options available for OpenAI API on the OpenAI pricing page.
