OpenAI has disrupted the application market with the unveiling of APIs for its state-of-the-art language model, ChatGPT, and its AI-powered transcription and translation service, Whisper.
These APIs will let businesses integrate ChatGPT and Whisper into their own conversation platforms at a lower cost than using the company’s existing language model.
For those unfamiliar with the term, an API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other.
OpenAI’s API offering will allow developers to access cutting-edge language and speech-to-text capabilities which can now be officially integrated into a third-party software.
ChatGPT and Whisper are now available through our API (plus developer policy updates). We ❤️ developers: https://t.co/vpoyxZ7XnD— OpenAI (@OpenAI) March 1, 2023
New pricing model
The ChatGPT APIs use the GPT 3.5 Turbo language model, which is the same family as the one used in the latest version of ChatGPT.
The new pricing model for ChatGPT requires companies to pay US$0.002 per 1,000 tokens, which equates to about 750 words.
OpenAI will provide a tool to help businesses assess how many tokens they would require for their customer query scale.
The company claims its pricing is 10 times cheaper than the existing GPT 3.5 models.
Meanwhile, the Whisper service is priced at US$0.006 per minute of audio input and accepts files in multiple formats, including M4A, MP3, MP4, MPEG, MPGA, WAV and WEBM.
High demand
ChatGPT was launched in November last year and has already registered 100 million active users.
However, due to high demand, the company could not keep up with the pace, leading to downtimes.
According to OpenAI, the text-to-speech market could be worth US$5.4 billion by 2026, up from US$2.2 billion in 2021.
If OpenAI establishes itself in the speech-to-text market, it could prove to be very profitable for the Microsoft-backed company.