Mastering OpenAI’s ChatGPT Integration in Python: A Comprehensive Guide (UPDATED)

Navigating Versions (0.x.x, 1.x.x), Models, Message Parameters, and Cost Management Strategies

If you want to integrate conversational AI into your application, OpenAI’s Chat Completion API could be just what you’re looking for. In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through:

• Setting up the OpenAI library and securing your Secret Key (Section 1):
  It’s crucial not to hardcode the Secret Key as a plain string in your Python code. If you inadvertently commit this code to an online platform like GitHub, OpenAI can identify the exposure and deactivate the key.
• Utilizing the Chat Completion API across different versions, including 0.x.x, 1.x.x (Section 2):
  The 1.x.x version represents a significant rewrite of the library. Understanding its changes and differences from earlier versions is crucial for efficient implementation.
• Understanding the prompting parameter (called messages)with the roles of user, assistant and system (Section 4):
  Grasping the distinctions between user, assistant, and system messages is vital for constructing prompts effectively. You need to master these roles to build a flexible ChatGPT agent that organizes messages from these three roles, along with a “function” role for tool usage. For a deeper dive, refer to my blog post.
• Managing the cost:
  The price is based on the tokens used in both the input prompt messages and the model’s output messages. To help control expenses, we provide code to 1) estimate the token count before making batch calls, 2) explain how OpenAI shows token usage for a single API call.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have a solid grasp of how to effectively use OpenAI’s Chat Completion API with Python, and help you avoid common caveats.

📝 Note: In this article, we only discuss the usage of openai API in Python. The official website provides information about using command line interface.

Section 1: Preparation

Installing the openai library

Simply use the package management system pip for the installation.

$ pip install openai

Access to the Secret Key