GPT-4 API General Availability
Practical report: the OpenAI API is a bad joke. If you think you can build a production app against it, think again. I've been trying to use it for the past 6 weeks or so. If you use tiny prompts, you'll generally be fine (that's why you always get people commenting that it works for them), but just try to get closer to the limits, especially with GPT-4.The API will make you wait up to 10 minutes, and then time out. What's worse, it will time out between their edge servers (cloudflare) and their internal servers, and the way OpenAI implemented their billing you will get a 4xx/5xx response code, but you will still get billed for the request and whatever the servers generated and you didn't get. That's borderline fraudulent.Meanwhile, their status page will happily show all green, so don't believe that. It seems to be manually updated and does not reflect the truth.Could it be that it works better in another region? Could it be just my region that is affected? Perhaps — but I won't know, because support is non-existent and hidden behind a moat. You need to jump through hoops and talk to bots, and then you eventually get a bot reply. That you can't respond to.My support requests about being charged for data I didn't have a chance to get have been unanswered for more than 5 weeks now.There is no way to contact OpenAI, no way to report problems, the API sometimes kind-of works, but mostly doesn't, and if you comment in the developer forums, you'll mostly get replies from apologists that explain that OpenAI is "growing quickly". I'd say you either provide a production paid API or you don't. At the moment, this looks very much like amateur hour, and charging for requests that were never fulfilled seems like a fraud to me.So, consider carefully whether you want to build against all that.