babbage
babbage is worth evaluating for general LLM work when its provider route and context window match the workload.
Use it for
- Teams evaluating general LLM work
- Workloads that can use a 2k context window
- Buyers comparing 1 tracked provider route
Do not use it for
- Vision or document-understanding workloads
- Strict JSON or tool-calling flows
- Family
- GPT-3
- Released
- 2023-08-22
- Context
- 2k
- Parameters
- 1.3B
- Architecture
- Decoder Only
- Knowledge cutoff
- 2021-09
- Specialization
- general
- Openness
- Proprietary
- License
- ProprietaryCommercial use: conditional
- Weights
- Not released
- Code
- Unknown
- Training
- Fine-tuned
Cheapest of 1 route · Azure OpenAI
About
The Babbage model is a large language AI model within the GPT-3 family, recognized for its speed and cost-effectiveness 569. Although it is not as capable as the Davinci model, it outperforms the Ada model in various capabilities 129. Ideal for simpler classification tasks and semantic searches, Babbage efficiently ranks document relevance to search queries 129. With an estimated 1.3 billion parameters 9, it requires less computational power compared to other models like Davinci, which has 175 billion parameters 9. Nonetheless, its role has been surpassed by more advanced models, such as GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4, known for their superior capabilities and efficiency 2.
babbage is a proprietary model in the GPT-3 family. The structured metadata tracks a 2k-token context window. This page tracks provider routes through Azure OpenAI, with the cheapest tracked route listed at $0.4 input and $0.4 output per 1M tokens. No headline benchmark score is tracked for babbage yet.
Top use-case fit
No primary decision-task fit is mapped for this model yet.
Provider price ladder
Compare API pricing across 1 providers for input and output tokens, batch, and cached reads when available.
| Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Route |
|---|---|---|---|
| Azure OpenAI | $0.400 | $0.400 | Provisioned |
Available via routers & gateways(5)
LiteLLM
GatewayOpen-source Python SDK and proxy server that unifies 100+ LLM APIs behind a single OpenAI-compatible interface, with load balancing, cost tracking, and configurable failover.
Portkey
GatewayProduction AI gateway routing to 1,600+ LLMs with failover, load balancing, semantic caching, and guardrails; Apache 2.0 core is fully self-hostable with the complete feature set.
Azure AI Foundry Model Router
RouterMicrosoft Azure AI Foundry's native model router that uses a trained ML model to route each prompt in real time to the optimal Azure-hosted model, with Balanced/Cost/Quality mode selection and automatic failover.
Helicone
GatewayObservability-first AI gateway with routing, caching, rate limiting, and request tracing; Apache 2.0 open-source core with a managed hosted tier for logging and analytics.
Kong AI Gateway
GatewayMulti-LLM AI gateway built on Kong Gateway 3.x, adding semantic routing, load balancing, guardrails, and MCP traffic analytics as plugins over Kong's existing API management platform.
Capabilities
No model capability flags are currently sourced.
Benchmark peer barsfor Coding
No task-mapped benchmark peers are available for this model yet.
Migration checks
No linked migration route is available for this model yet.
API versions
babbagebabbage-002Frequently asked questions
What is the context window of babbage?
babbage has a context window of 2k tokens.
How much does babbage cost?
babbage is available at $0.40/1M input tokens through Azure OpenAI.
When was babbage released?
babbage was released on 2023-08-22.
Which providers offer babbage?
babbage is available from 1 provider: Azure OpenAI.
Cheapest of 1 route · Azure OpenAI