GPT-4 API general availability and deprecation of older models in the Completions API
OpenAI
OpenAI just opened GPT-4's API to everyone, no waitlist needed. Old Completions models get the boot in 2024, so time to upgrade your code.
Based on reporting by OpenAI — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI flipped the switch on general availability for GPT-4's API, ending months of waitlist purgatory for developers who wanted in but couldn't get access. GPT-3.5 Turbo, DALL·E, and Whisper are also now fully available, which means the company's whole flagship lineup — text, image, and audio — is finally out of beta and open for business.
But the bigger story here might be what's going away, not what's arriving. OpenAI laid out a deprecation timeline for older Completions API models, and the retirement date is set for early 2024. That's not a huge amount of runway for teams that built products on those legacy models years ago and never got around to updating them.
This is a pattern worth watching. OpenAI has been steadily nudging developers toward its newer chat-based endpoints, and killing off the old Completions models is the clearest push yet. Anyone still running production systems on GPT-3 era models now has a countdown clock ticking.
The practical upshot: if you're building on OpenAI right now, GPT-4 access is no longer the bottleneck. Migration planning is.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Waitlists were always a soft rationing tool dressed up as caution, and dropping them now tells me capacity concerns have eased more than safety concerns have. The real tell is the 2024 deprecation deadline — OpenAI is quietly forcing the entire ecosystem onto its newest, most monitorable models, which is smart business wearing a safety-first costume.
Read more about this at: OpenAI