OpenAI Developer Platform

The OpenAI Developer Platform provides API access to GPT, DALL-E, Whisper, and other AI models. It is the primary way developers integrate OpenAI's models into their applications, offering endpoints for chat completions, image generation, text-to-speech, moderation, and more.

Getting Started

1. Create an Account

Sign up at platform.openai.com and generate an API key.

2. Set Your Environment Variable

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-your-api-key-here

3. Install the SDK

npm install openai

4. Make an API Call

import OpenAI from 'openai';

const openai = new OpenAI();

const completion = await openai.chat.completions.create({
  model: 'gpt-4-turbo',
  messages: [
    { role: 'system', content: 'You are a helpful assistant.' },
    { role: 'user', content: 'What is TypeScript?' },
  ],
});

console.log(completion.choices[0].message.content);

Key APIs

Using with AI SDK (Recommended)

For Next.js applications, use the AI SDK provider for simpler integration:

import { openai } from '@ai-sdk/openai';
import { streamText } from 'ai';

const result = streamText({
  model: openai('gpt-4-turbo'),
  messages,
});

return result.toDataStreamResponse();

Responses API

The Responses API is OpenAI's latest endpoint, combining chat completions with built-in tools:

import { openai } from '@ai-sdk/openai';
import { generateText } from 'ai';

const { text } = await generateText({
  model: openai.responses('gpt-4o'),
  prompt: 'What happened in tech news today?',
});

Best Practices

• Store API keys in environment variables, never in code
• Set max_tokens to control response length and costs
• Use gpt-4o-mini for simpler tasks to reduce costs
• Implement rate limiting to stay within API quotas
• Monitor usage in the OpenAI dashboard

Resources

• OpenAI API Documentation
• OpenAI Cookbook
• AI SDK OpenAI Provider
• OpenAI Pricing