While both davinci and text-davinci-003 are powerful models, they differ in a few key ways.

text-davinci-003 is the newer and more capable model, designed specifically for instruction-following tasks. This enables it to respond concisely and more accurately - even in zero-shot scenarios, i.e. without the need for any examples given in the prompt. davinci, on the other hand, can be fine-tuned on a specific task, which can make it very effective if you have access to at least a few hundred training examples.

Additionally, text-davinci-003 supports a longer context window (max prompt+completion length) than davinci - 4097 tokens compared to davinci's 2049.

Finally, text-davinci-003 was trained on a more recent dataset, containing data up to June 2021. These updates, along with its support for Inserting text, make text-davinci-003 a particularly versatile and powerful model we recommend for most use-cases.