chat_openai: Chat with an OpenAI model

In ellmer: Chat with Large Language Models

Chat with an OpenAI model

Description

OpenAI provides a number of chat-based models, mostly under the ChatGPT brand. Note that a ChatGPT Plus membership does not grant access to the API. You will need to sign up for a developer account (and pay for it) at the developer platform.

For authentication, we recommend saving your API key to the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable in your .Renviron file. You can easily edit this file by calling usethis::edit_r_environ().

Usage

chat_openai(
  system_prompt = NULL,
  turns = NULL,
  base_url = "https://api.openai.com/v1",
  api_key = openai_key(),
  model = NULL,
  seed = NULL,
  api_args = list(),
  echo = c("none", "text", "all")
)

Arguments

system_prompt	A system prompt to set the behavior of the assistant.
turns	A list of Turns to start the chat with (i.e., continuing a previous conversation). If not provided, the conversation begins from scratch.
base_url	The base URL to the endpoint; the default uses OpenAI.
api_key	The API key to use for authentication. You generally should not supply this directly, but instead set the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable.
model	The model to use for the chat. The default, NULL, will pick a reasonable default, and tell you about. We strongly recommend explicitly choosing a model for all but the most casual use.
seed	Optional integer seed that ChatGPT uses to try and make output more reproducible.
api_args	Named list of arbitrary extra arguments appended to the body of every chat API call.
echo	One of the following options: none: don't emit any output (default when running in a function). text: echo text output as it streams in (default when running at the console). all: echo all input and output. Note this only affects the chat() method.

Value

A Chat object.

See Also

Other chatbots: chat_bedrock(), chat_claude(), chat_cortex_analyst(), chat_databricks(), chat_deepseek(), chat_gemini(), chat_github(), chat_groq(), chat_ollama(), chat_openrouter(), chat_perplexity()

Examples

chat <- chat_openai()
chat$chat("
  What is the difference between a tibble and a data frame?
  Answer with a bulleted list
")

chat$chat("Tell me three funny jokes about statistcians")

ellmer documentation built on April 4, 2025, 3:53 a.m.