ChatGPT is one of the AI tools that helped kick off the current AI trend, with an impressive (but often incorrect) ability to handle multi-step prompts and code problems. Your favorite apps might soon have AI features powered by ChatGPT.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and the DALL-E image generator, has released a public API for ChatGPT after six months of private testing with select partners. It allows anyone to integrate ChatGPT's AI model into other applications and services, feeding it data and receiving a response. OpenAI also released a public API for Whisper, its speech-to-text model.

Most AI models still require a decent amount of computational power, but OpenAI says it has heavily optimized ChatGPT over the past few months. The company wrote, "Through a series of system-wide optimizations, we've achieved 90% cost reduction for ChatGPT since December; we're now passing through those savings to API users."

The ChatGPT API is already being used in Snapchat (for the "My AI" feature), Quizlet, Instacart, Shop from Shopify, and the Speak language learning app. Now that the API is public, you can expect a lot more apps to add AI chatbots, even if they don't improve the general experience -- Snapchat's implementation is just ChatGPT in the direct messages interface, for example.

The news comes as Microsoft's Bing Chat, which is partially based on ChatGPT technology, starts arriving in more Microsoft apps. ChatGPT is still worse at general knowledge prompts than Bing, since its database is a few years old and doesn't provide sources, but it has the advantage of already being fully available. The "new Bing" is still locked behind a waitlist, and there are other alternatives to ChatGPT as well.

Source: OpenAI