Simon Willison’s Weblog

OpenAI: Function calling and other API updates. Huge set of announcements from OpenAI today. A bunch of price reductions, but the things that most excite me are the new gpt-3.5-turbo-16k model which offers a 16,000 token context limit (4x the existing 3.5 turbo model) at a price of $0.003 per 1K input tokens and $0.004 per 1K output tokens—1/10th the price of GPT-4 8k.

The other big new feature: functions! You can now send JSON schema defining one or more functions to GPT 3.5 and GPT-4—those models will then return a blob of JSON describing a function they want you to call (if they determine that one should be called). Your code executes the function and passes the results back to the model to continue the execution flow.

This is effectively an implementation of the ReAct pattern, with models that have been fine-tuned to execute it.

They acknowledge the risk of prompt injection (though not by name) in the post: “We are working to mitigate these and other risks. Developers can protect their applications by only consuming information from trusted tools and by including user confirmation steps before performing actions with real-world impact, such as sending an email, posting online, or making a purchase.”