For three months ChatGPT has been something you visit: a website, a text box, a queue. From Wednesday it is something any programmer can build into anything. OpenAI has released the ChatGPT API — the same model that runs the chatbot, called gpt-3.5-turbo, offered to developers at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens, roughly 750 words. That is a tenth of what OpenAI charged for its previous best model. It released a speech-to-text API, Whisper, on the same day.
What an API is
An application programming interface is a door a company leaves open for other people’s software. Your app sends OpenAI a message; OpenAI’s model replies; your app shows the reply to your user. The user never sees OpenAI and does not need an account with it — they see your app, with a chatbot inside. Microsoft has had this access for a year, which is how Bing got its chat. Now everyone has it, on a credit card.
Who launched with it
Snapchat’s My AI, a chatbot pinned to the top of 750 million users’ friend lists; Instacart’s “Ask Instacart”, which turns “what do I need for a Ramadan iftar for six?” into a shopping list; Shopify’s shopping assistant in its Shop app; and Quizlet’s Q-Chat tutor. Each was built in weeks. OpenAI also changed its data policy: text sent through the API is no longer used to train its models unless the developer opts in, which removes the main objection businesses had.
What the price means in taka
At $0.002 per 1,000 tokens, a chatbot exchange of 300 words in and 300 out costs about a tenth of a US cent — a hundred conversations for a taka, in round numbers. A customer-service bot answering ten thousand queries a day would cost less than a single call-centre agent’s lunch. The cost of adding a language model to a product has, in one announcement, stopped being a consideration. That is the significance: not that the model is new, but that it is now cheaper than the humans it substitutes for, everywhere, at once.
Why it matters in Dhaka
Bangladesh’s software industry does not train models and will not for years; it builds products for clients. From today it can build products with ChatGPT inside — a Bangla customer-service bot for a bank, an English-writing assistant for a garment exporter’s sales team, a question-answering layer over a company’s documents — for a marginal cost near zero. The model’s Bangla is weak, and the first useful local products will be English-facing or will translate. But the constraint that kept AI out of a 20-person Dhaka software house — the cost and the access — ended on 1 March. Expect the pitch decks to follow.
Source: ZDNet, via Prothom Alo.
