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What's changed with engine names and best practices?
What's changed with engine names and best practices?
Yaniv Markovski avatar
Written by Yaniv Markovski
Updated over a week ago

This article is only relevant if you started using the API before January 20, 2022.

Summary

The Instruct series, previously in beta, are now our recommended GPT-3 models, and we're updating our engine names as part of this change.

New GPT-3 models

In 2021, we released a set of beta GPT-3 models called the Instruct series. The Instruct models, unlike our original base GPT-3 models, are optimized to follow your instructions. This means they're better at producing accurate completions for your prompts, as you can see below.

Base model example

Instruct model example

Prompt

Explain the moon landing to a 6 year old in a few sentences.

Completion

Explain the moon landing to a 6 year old in a few sentences.

Explain the moon landing to a 6 year old in a few sentences.

Explain the moon landing to a 6 year old in a few sentences.

Prompt

Explain the moon landing to a 6 year old in a few sentences.

Completion

In 1969, the United States sent a spacecraft called Apollo 11 to land on the moon. Astronauts named Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin were the first people to step out of the spacecraft and walk on the moon.

After overwhelmingly positive feedback, we're making these models our primary GPT-3 models and removing the "Instruct" descriptor. Going forward, we recommend using them for all natural language tasks. For most use cases, we expect that you can use them as a drop-in replacement for the base models with no changes to your prompt.

The base GPT-3 models are still available, but we don't recommend using them unless you're fine-tuning a custom model or using our search, answers, or classification endpoints.

New engine names

As part of this change, we've also updated most of our engine names to be clearer and support adding more models in the future. API requests that specify the old engine names will continue working as expected, but we recommend that you start using the new names going forward.

Type

Old engine name

New engine name

Latest Instruct GPT-3 models

davinci-instruct-beta-v3

curie-instruct-beta-v2

babbage-instruct-beta

ada-instruct-beta

text-davinci-001

text-curie-001

text-babbage-001

text-ada-001

Older Instruct GPT-3 models

davinci-instruct-beta

curie-instruct-beta

No change

Base GPT-3 models

davinci

curie

babbage

ada

No change

Codex models

davinci-codex

cushman-codex

code-davinci-001

code-cushman-001

Similarity embeddings models

ada-similarity

babbage-similarity

curie-similarity

davinci-similarity

text-similarity-ada-001

text-similarity-babbage-001

text-similarity-curie-001

text-similarity-davinci-001

Text search embeddings models

ada-search-document

ada-search-query

babbage-search-document

babbage-search-query

curie-search-document

curie-search-query

text-search-ada-doc-001

text-search-ada-query-001

text-search-babbage-doc-001

text-search-babbage-query-001

text-search-curie-doc-001

text-search-curie-query-001

Code search embeddings models

ada-code-search-code

ada-code-search-text

babbage-code-search-code

babbage-code-search-text

code-search-ada-code-001

code-search-ada-text-001

code-search-babbage-code-001

code-search-babbage-text-001

Content filter

content-filter-alpha

No change

If you have any questions about these updates, please log into your account and start a new conversation using the on-site chat tool. Alternatively, ask a question on our community forum.

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