After a limited trial OpenAI has unleashed its ChatGPT and Whisper models on developers, who can now integrate chatbot interaction and speech-to-text conversion into their own applications through API calls.

ChatGPT is a language model tuned for responding to questions and has attracted considerable attention since its November 30, 2022 debut. Presented with a text prompt, it has a fair chance of formulating an acceptable response if the answer can be found in its training data. Or if queried with a jailbreak prompt, it may reply in a way that violates its safety rules.

Whisper is an automatic speech recognition system released last September. It’s capable of turning spoken English into text, which can then be input into ChatGPT or used for any other speech-to-text application, like interview transcription.

The ChatGPT model family released on Wednesday, gpt-3.5-turbo, is offered at a price of $0.002 per 1,000 tokens (~750 words), which OpenAI says is 10x cheaper than previous GPT-3.5 models. The Whisper large-V2 model is priced at $0.006 / minute. There’s also an open source version of the code, though OpenAI admits it can be hard to run.

Max Woolf, a data scientist, in an online post, observes that that the API pricing is extraordinarily low.

“I have no idea how OpenAI can make money on this,” he said. “This has to be a loss-leader to lock out competitors before they even get off the ground.”

There is of course no guarantee these prices won’t rise later.

Source: https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/openai_api_chatgpt_whisper/