How to use ChatGPT APIs in Python 🤖🐍

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OpenAI ChatGPT APIs are out! They open a new endless possibilities. Today we're going to see how to use them in Python

Setup

Get an API key

Log into OpenAI website and, if you are not on the free tier, add a credit card. After that go to the profile section (top right) and click on View API keys.

Then click on Create new secret key and store your key, you will need it later.

Install pip package

Now, install the openai pip package

pip install --upgrade openai

We're ready to go!

Make a simple request

The official doc is here. To make a simple request, you will need to import the openai package and call the openai.ChatCompletion.create method by passing the model id and a list of messages.

# main.py
import openai

chat_completion = openai.ChatCompletion.create(
    model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
    messages=[
        # system message first, it helps set the behavior of the assistant
        {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
        # I am the user, and this is my prompt
        {"role": "user", "content": "What's the best star wars movie?"},
        # we can also add the previous conversation
        # {"role": "assistant", "content": "Episode III."},
    ],
)

messages is a list of dictionaries with key role and content. role can be system, use it to set the bot behaviour, useris the user interacting with the bot (ourself) andassistantis the chatbot. Insidecontent` we place our text.

We need to have export OPENAI_API_KEY in order to let OpenAI knows who we are. Set the env variable OPENAI_API_KEY to the one you have created before

export OPENAI_API_KEY=<YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY>

Then, we can run the python script with the code above:

ChatGPT replies: As an AI language model, I cannot give my personal opinion about movies or any topic. However, according to Rotten Tomatoes, the highest-rated Star Wars movie is "The Empire Strikes Back" released in 1980.

Creating a chat cli

We can go one step further by creating a little interactive chat we can run in the terminal

# cli.py
import openai
import os


messages = [
    # system message first, it helps set the behavior of the assistant
    {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
]

while True:
    message = input("👨‍💻: ")
    if message:
        messages.append(
            {"role": "user", "content": message},
        )
        # doc is here https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/chat/chat-vs-completions?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=248334739&utm_content=248334739&utm_source=hs_email
        chat_completion = openai.ChatCompletion.create(
            model="gpt-3.5-turbo", messages=messages
        )
    # get the reply
    reply = chat_completion.choices[0].message.content
    print(f"🤖: {reply}")
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": reply})

Then, assuming you have the code inside cli.py, we can run it (remember to set the env variable OPENAI_API_KEY)

python cli.py

And we can use ChatGPT in the terminal

Amazing, he knows the answer! 🎉

Conclusion

This was a quick tutorial about how to use the new ChatGPT APIs in python, the possibilities are infinite!

See you in the next one 🚀

Fra