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New tools for building agents

openai.com

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Re: New tools for building agents

#111

Post by bob1029 »

Androider wrote: post #107
bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

Exactly. You would have to be naive to build a company on top of this kind of API. LLMs are going to be become commodities, and this is OpenAI fighting against that fate as their valuation and continued investment requirements doesn't make any sense otherwise. If you built on the Assistant API, maybe take the hint and don't just rewrite to the Responses API? Own your product, black box the LLM-of-the-day.

> OpenAI fighting against that fate as their valuation and continued investment requirements doesn't make any sense otherwise.

Is it actually the case that OpenAI couldn't be viable if all they offered was a simple chat completion API on top of the web experience?

It seems to me the devil is all in how the margin plays out. I'd focus on driving down costs and pushing boundaries on foundation models. If you are always a half step ahead, highly reliable and reasonably cheap, your competitors will have a tough time. Valuations can be justified if businesses begin to trust the roadmap and stability of the services.

I'll tell you what's not working right now is the insane model naming scheme and rapid fire vision changes. This kind of stuff is spooking the technology leaders of large prospective customers. Only the most permanently online people can keep things straight. Everyone was super excited and on board with AI in 2024 because who wants to be left out. I think that energy is still justified in many ways, but we've also got to find a way to meet more of the customer base where they are currently at. Wrappers and agentic SDKs are not what these people are looking for. Many F500s already have a gigantic development team who can deal with deep, nasty API integrations and related state contraptions. They're looking for assurances/evidence that OAI's business & product line will remain stable for the next 5+ years before going all-in.

Re: New tools for building agents

#112

Post by ripped_britches »

bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

100000000000%

Don’t be fooled by moving state management to somewhere other than your business logic unless it enables a novel use case (which these SDKs do not)

With that said, glad to see the agentic endpoints available but still going to be managing my state this way

Re: New tools for building agents

#113

Post by [deleted] »

bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

[deleted]

Re: New tools for building agents

#114

Post by sagarpatil »

bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

Couldn’t have said it better. I’ve developed multiple agents with just function calling, structured outputs and they have been in production for more than a year (back in the day we did not call it agent lol) I think these is targeted towards people who are already using agent frameworks + OpenAI API.

Re: New tools for building agents

#115

Post by samstave »

bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

The weak point in the OAI armor is SLAs.

So - are people forming relationships with OAI which include an SLA, and if so - what do those look like?

Re: New tools for building agents

#116

Post by LeoPanthera »

I don't know about agents, but this finally adds the ability to search the web to the API. This is a very useful big deal.

Kind of annoying that they've made a bunch of tiny changes to the history format though. It doesn't seem to change anything important, and only serves to make existing code incompatible.

Re: New tools for building agents

#117

Post by BonoboIO »

sagarpatil wrote: post #114
bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

Couldn’t have said it better. I’ve developed multiple agents with just function calling, structured outputs and they have been in production for more than a year (back in the day we did not call it agent lol) I think these is targeted towards people who are already using agent frameworks + OpenAI API.

What are the agents doing for you? Just interested in your actual use cases.

Re: New tools for building agents

#118

Post by jjfoooo4 »

daviding wrote: post #93
bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

This bit feels like we are being pushed away from the existing API for non-technical reasons? > When using Chat Completions, the model always retrieves information from the web before responding to your query. To use web_search_preview as a tool that models like gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini invoke only when necessary, switch to using the Responses API. Porting over to the new Responses API is non-trivial, and we already ha…

From their perspective, if they don’t have your data, it’s too easy to switch providers.

Re: New tools for building agents

#119

Post by jjfoooo4 »

bob1029 wrote: post #111
Androider wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. You would have to be naive to build a company on top of this kind of API. LLMs are going to be become commodities, and this is OpenAI fighting against that fate as their valuation and continued investment requirements doesn't make any sense otherwise. If you built on the Assistant API, maybe take the hint and don't just rewrite to the Responses API? Own your product, black box the LLM-of-the-day.

> OpenAI fighting against that fate as their valuation and continued investment requirements doesn't make any sense otherwise. Is it actually the case that OpenAI couldn't be viable if all they offered was a simple chat completion API on top of the web experience? It seems to me the devil is all in how the margin plays out. I'd focus on driving down costs and pushing boundaries on foundation models. If you are always…

The point of the bear thesis on OpenAI is that training frontier models is extraordinarily expensive. They can’t produce cutting edge models, charge a cheap price, and make a profit all at once

Re: New tools for building agents

#120

Post by _bramses »

rvz wrote: post #8

They did not announce the price(s) in the presentation. Likely because they know it is going to be very expensive: Web Search [0] * $30 and $25 per 1K queries for GPT‑4o search and 4o-mini search. File search [1] * $2.50 per 1K queries and file storage at $0.10/GB/day * First 1GB is free. Computer use tool (computer-use-preview model) [2] * $3 per 1M input tokens and $12/1M output tokens. [0] https://platform.openai.…

For anyone who's looking Brave Search is $3/1000 requests [0]

I also wrote a script that searches the web and works pretty well (using the vercel ai sdk)[1]

[0] - https://brave.com/search/api/

[1] - https://gist.github.com/bramses/41e90b27d156590154bcefd4119f...

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