Using GPT-3.5 Turbo (Instruct) on Azure OpenAI

Quick Start

1. 1
   Create an account at Azure OpenAI and generate an API key.
2. 2
   Use the Azure OpenAI SDK or REST API to call gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct — see the documentation for request format.
3. 3
   You'll be billed $1.50/1M input, $2.00/1M output tokens. See full pricing.

Code Examples

import os
from openai import AzureOpenAI

client = AzureOpenAI(
    azure_endpoint=os.environ["AZURE_OPENAI_ENDPOINT"],  # e.g. https://{resource}.openai.azure.com
    api_key=os.environ["AZURE_OPENAI_API_KEY"],
    api_version="2024-02-01"
)
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct",  # your deployment name
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

About Azure OpenAI

Azure OpenAI Service hosts OpenAI's GPT-4o, GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and embedding models on Microsoft Azure with enterprise SLAs. Deployments run in customer-selected regions with private networking, role-based access control, and capacity options spanning Standard pay-per-token, Provisioned Throughput Units (PTUs) for reserved capacity, Global Standard shared capacity, and Batch processing. Azure OpenAI sits inside the wider Microsoft Foundry / Azure AI Studio control plane, which adds an evaluation, monitoring, and Agent Service layer on top of the base model APIs. For workloads that need non-OpenAI models (Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Llama, Mistral, NVIDIA Nemotron), Microsoft Foundry is the broader catalog; Azure OpenAI is the OpenAI-specific entry point. The service is API-compatible with the OpenAI SDK in most flows, so teams typically swap base URLs and authentication rather than rewriting calls.

Azure OpenAI Service hosts OpenAI's GPT-4o, GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and embedding models on Microsoft Azure with enterprise SLAs. Microsoft's broader AI platform spans Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure AI Search, plus productivity tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot and developer tooling in Visual Studio and the .NET framework. The platform emphasizes responsible AI, security, and regional compliance.

Pricing on Azure OpenAI

Capabilities

About GPT-3.5 Turbo (Instruct)

GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct by OpenAI is designed to excel in precise instruction following and task completion, focusing on accuracy and clarity over conversational abilities. It offers key enhancements like efficient instruction adherence, reduced hallucination, and lower toxicity compared to previous models. Compatible with legacy completion endpoints, it retains the speed and affordability of the standard GPT-3.5 Turbo model while using a 4K context window and training data up to September 2021. Not specifically built for chat, it still supports diverse tasks like question answering, text completion, and code generation, aiming to enhance AI usability with safer and more accurate interactions.