What changed when OpenAI opened the GPT-4 API to all paying developers and launched Code Interpreter?

On July 6, 2023 OpenAI made GPT-4 available through its API to every existing developer with a record of paid usage, ending the waitlist for them, and declared its GPT-3.5 Turbo, DALL·E and Whisper APIs ready for general use. The same day it began rolling out Code Interpreter, a ChatGPT Plus beta that lets ChatGPT write and run code on files you upload, over the following week.

What changed when OpenAI opened the GPT-4 API to all paying…

Yesterday, July 6, 2023, OpenAI made two announcements on the same day, one for developers and one for ChatGPT subscribers. For developers, GPT-4, the company's most capable model, is no longer behind a waitlist for anyone who already pays for the API. For ChatGPT Plus subscribers, a feature called Code Interpreter is arriving: ChatGPT can now write a small program, run it, and show you the result, using files you give it.

Both moves take tools that were limited to a few testers since March and put them in many more hands.

What OpenAI announced for developers

The API is the service that lets programs, not people typing in a chat window, send text to OpenAI's models. Since GPT-4 appeared in March, access to it has been rationed. OpenAI says millions of developers have asked for it since then.

Here is what changes, according to OpenAI's blog post:

Change	Detail
GPT-4 access	Open now to every current API customer who has paid bills successfully before, with an 8K context window
New developers	Access planned by the end of July, then higher rate limits (how many requests you may send per minute) as computing capacity allows
General availability	GPT-3.5 Turbo, DALL·E (images) and Whisper (speech-to-text) APIs are declared ready for production use
Fine-tuning	Training GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo on your own data is expected later this year
Older models	The original Completions API is now "legacy"; several older models retire on January 4, 2024

The "8K context" means GPT-4 can consider about 8,000 tokens at once, a token being a word or part of a word. TechCrunch notes that a larger 32,000-token version exists, and that GPT-4's ability to understand images is still being tested with a single partner, a company called Be My Eyes.

Why OpenAI is moving everyone to chat

The second half of the developer announcement is about retirement. OpenAI's first API, launched in 2020, took a single block of text and continued it. That style is called completions. In March, OpenAI introduced Chat Completions, where a request is a list of messages, each labeled as coming from the system, the user or the assistant.

OpenAI says chat-style requests now make up 97% of its API's GPT usage. It argues that the structure gives better results, supports features such as function calling, and helps reduce prompt injection, the trick of hiding instructions inside user-supplied text, because the developer's instructions sit apart from what users type. Older completion models will be replaced by new versions on January 4, 2024. Older embeddings models must move to text-embedding-ada-002, and OpenAI says it will pay the cost of re-processing customers' content.

What Code Interpreter does

The ChatGPT release notes describe Code Interpreter in one line: it lets ChatGPT run code, with optional access to files you upload. The suggested uses are analyzing data, making charts, editing files and doing math.

Language models are good with words but unreliable with long calculations, because they predict text rather than compute. Code Interpreter changes the job. Instead of guessing an average, ChatGPT writes a short program in Python, a popular programming language, runs it, and reports the answer the program produced. The arithmetic is done by the computer, not guessed by the model.

Here is what a session can look like, step by step:

Upload a spreadsheet file, for example a CSV of a year of household expenses.
Ask a question in plain language:

Prompt

This file lists my expenses for 2022. Which three categories cost the most? Make a bar chart by month and tell me which month was highest.

ChatGPT writes Python code to load the file and add up each category.
It runs the code and reports the totals.
It writes and runs more code to draw the chart.
You follow up: "Remove the rent category and redraw the chart."

Why it matters

For developers, open GPT-4 access means they can build products on the strongest model without waiting, and plan around OpenAI's shift to the chat format. TechCrunch adds the usual caution: GPT-4 still makes up facts and reasoning errors, sometimes with confidence.

For everyday users, Code Interpreter is a practical step: tasks that once needed a spreadsheet expert or a programmer can start with a question. The answers can still be wrong, for example if the file is messy or the question is ambiguous, so it pays to ask ChatGPT to explain the steps it took and to spot-check a few numbers. Browsing, the other big beta, is paused for now: OpenAI disabled it on July 3 after finding it could sometimes show content in ways the company did not intend, such as the full text of a page.

Try it: Pick a small table you understand well, such as ten rows of your monthly bills. Before using any tool, write down the total and the largest item yourself. Then ask an AI with Code Interpreter for the same figures and compare.

How can you try Code Interpreter or the GPT-4 API this week?

For Code Interpreter you need ChatGPT Plus and the web version of ChatGPT. OpenAI says the rollout reaches all Plus users over the next week. When it appears, click your name, open the beta features in settings and toggle Code Interpreter on. Begin with a small, non-sensitive file, and ask ChatGPT to explain each step it takes.

For the API, if you already have a paid OpenAI developer account with past payments, you can now request GPT-4 by name in your code. New developers should expect access by the end of the month. If you maintain an app that uses older completion models, now is a good time to plan a move to Chat Completions before the January 2024 deadline.