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April 13, 2024, 8:54 p.m. |

Simon Willison's Weblog simonwillison.net

Lessons after a half-billion GPT tokens


Ken Kantzer presents some hard-won experience from shipping real features on top of OpenAI's models.


They ended up settling on a very basic abstraction over the chat API - mainly to handle automatic retries on a 500 error. No complex wrappers, not even JSON mode or function calling or system prompts.


Rather than counting tokens they estimate tokens as 3 times the length in characters, which works well enough.


One challenge they highlight for …

abstraction ai api basic billion chat error experience features function generativeai gpt json llms openai promptengineering shipping tokens

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