Using GPT-3.5 Turbo on OpenAI API

Implementation guide · GPT-3.5 · OpenAI

Serverless

OpenAI API exposes GPT-3.5 Turbo through model ID gpt-3.5-turbo. Use the setup steps, sourced pricing, capabilities, and official provider links below to validate this route before deployment.

Last refreshed 2026-05-10. Next refresh: weekly.

Quick Start

  1. 1
    Create an account at OpenAI API and generate an API key.
  2. 2
    Use the OpenAI API SDK or REST API to call gpt-3.5-turbo — see the documentation for request format.
  3. 3
    You'll be billed $0.50/1M input, $1.50/1M output tokens. See full pricing.

Code Examples

Install
pip install openai
API key
OPENAI_API_KEY
Model ID
gpt-3.5-turbo

Use the model slug directly, e.g. "gpt-4o" or "gpt-4.1-mini".

import os
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI()  # reads OPENAI_API_KEY from env
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Pricing on OpenAI API

TypePrice (per 1M)
Input tokens$0.50
Output tokens$1.50

Capabilities

Structured Outputs

About GPT-3.5 Turbo

GPT-3.5 Turbo is an advanced language model developed by OpenAI, showcasing significant advancements over GPT-3 and GPT-3.5. As the engine behind the popular ChatGPT application, it excels in tasks like text generation, translation, question answering, summarization, and code generation. This model employs Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to enhance accuracy and produce policy-optimized responses. Despite its prowess, it has a knowledge cutoff of September 2021 and can demonstrate biases from its training data. Occasionally, it may generate incorrect or nonsensical content, known as "hallucination," and is sensitive to input phrasing variations.

Model Specs

Released2023-03-01
Parameters20B
Context16k
ArchitectureDecoder Only
Knowledge cutoff2021-09

Provider

OpenAI API

OpenAI

San Francisco, California, United States