The Assistants API enables developers to easily build powerful AI assistants within their apps. This API removes the need to manage conversation history and adds access to OpenAI-hosted tools like Code Interpreter and Retrieval. The API also supports improved function-calling for 3rd party tools.

The Assistants API is currently in beta and available to anyone with an OpenAI API account.

An Assistant represents a purpose-built AI that uses OpenAI’s models, access files, maintain persistent threads and call tools.

A thread is a conversation session between an assistant and a user. Threads simplify application development by storing message history and truncating it when the conversation gets too long for the model’s context length.

Code Interpreter is priced at $0.03 / session. If your assistant calls Code Interpreter simultaneously in two different threads, this would create two Code Interpreter sessions (2 * $0.03). Each session is active by default for one hour, which means that you would only pay this fee once if your user keeps giving instructions to Code Interpreter in the same thread for up to one hour.

Retrieval is priced at $0.20/GB per assistant per day. If your application stores 1GB of files for one day and passes it to two Assistants for the purpose of retrieval (e.g., customer-facing Assistant #1 and internal employee Assistant #2), you’ll be charged twice for this storage fee (2 * $0.20 per day). This fee does not vary with the number of end users and threads retrieving knowledge from a given assistant.

No. While function calling enables the model to select tools and format requests for them, executing calls to 3rd party tools is not managed by OpenAI.

As with the rest of our platform, data and files passed to the OpenAI API are never used to train our models and you can delete your data whenever you require.

At this time, DALL-E will not be available.

We would love to hear your feedback on our Developer Forum or on Twitter @OpenAIDevs.