San Francisco, Jul 7 (IANS): Microsoft-owned OpenAI has announced the general availability of its latest text-generating model GPT-4, through its API (Application Programming Interface).

"Starting today, all paying API customers have access to GPT-4. In March, we introduced the ChatGPT API, and earlier this month we released our first updates to the chat-based models. We envision a future where chat-based models can support any use case," OpenAI said in a blogpost on Thursday.

Now all existing API developers with a history of successful payments can access the GPT-4 API with 8,000 contexts, plus the company plans to open up access to new developers by the end of this month, and then start raising rate limits after that depending on compute availability.

"Millions of developers have requested access to the GPT-4 API since March, and the range of innovative products leveraging GPT-4 is growing every day," OpenAI said.

Moreover, the company announced the deprecation plan for older models of the Completions API and recommended that users adopt the Chat Completions API.

According to the company, the Chat Completions API's structured interface (e.g., system messages, function calling) and multi-turn conversation capabilities enable developers to build conversational experiences and a broad range of completion tasks.

It also helps lower the risk of prompt injection attacks, since user-provided content can be structurally separated from instructions.

OpenAI is also making the GPT-3.5 Turbo, DALL·E and Whisper APIs generally available.

The company is working on safely enabling fine-tuning for GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo and expects this feature to be available later this year.