we expect responses and realtime to be our 2 core api primitives long term — responses for turn by turn interactions and realtime for models requiring low latency bidirectional streams to/from the apps/models.
one additional difference between chat and responses is the number model turns a single api call can make. chat completions is a single turn api primitive -- which means it can talk to the model just once. responses is capable of making multiple model turns and tool calls in a single api call.
for example, you can give the responses api access to 3 tools: a vector store with some user memories (file_search), the shopify mcp server, and code_interpreter. you can then ask it to look up some user memories, find relevant items in the shopify mcp store, and then download them into a csv file. all of this can be done in a single api call that involves multiple model turns and tool calls.
p.s. - you can also use responses statelessly by setting store=false.
I hear you and really appreciate the patience here.
We're almost ready to share a migration guide. Today, we closed the gap between Assistants and Responses by launching Code Interpreter and support for multiple vector stores in File Search.
We still need to add support for Assistants and Threads objects to Responses before we can give devs a simple migration path. Working on this actively and hope to have all of this out in the coming weeks.
there's no rush to do this - in the coming weeks, we will add support for:
- assistant-like and thread-like objects to the responses api
- async responses
- code interpreter in responses
once we do this, we'll share a migration guide that allows you to move over without any loss of features or data. we'll also give you a full 12 months to do your migration. feel free to reach out at nikunj[at]openai.com if you have any questions about any of this, and thank you so much for building on the assistants api beta! I think you'll really like responses api too!
Proud to have Stainless as a partner at OpenAI. All our SDKs are generated by them. Alex, Robert, Philip and team are extremely thoughtful about SDK design and push us to improve our API + other products while they're at it. Stainless is bringing a new standard of SDKs to our industry and this is a great thing for all developers.