Learning to use the ChatGPT API

For many of the uses we covered in Chapter 2, it makes sense to use the ChatGPT web interface or the interactive playground.

However, OpenAI provides an extensive API that allows you to carry out several tasks with their models, including interacting with ChatGPT and their other models using code. So, if you’re looking to create complex applications with ChatGPT, and I’m hoping you are, then using the API is the way to go.

In this section, we’ll take a closer look at the different techniques you can use to interact with the ChatGPT API. These techniques will be used throughout the remaining chapters.

Getting started

You can easily interact with the API through standard HTTP requests from any language, via the official Python or Node.js library, or a community-maintained library. It’s useful to look at examples of the code needed to interact with the API by looking at the Playground and clicking on the code option...