The original engine behind the global ChatGPT phenomenon. Highly optimized for conversational dialogue, rapid response, and cost-effective API deployment.
Technical Specifications
- Provider
- OpenAI
- Category
- fast
- Release Date
- 2022-11
- Batch API Discount
- 50% off async batch
- Consumer Subscription
- $20 / month
- Reasoning Effort Control
- Fixed
- Structured Outputs
- Yes
- Output Modalities
- text
- Official Documentation
- Visit Official Docs ↗
Data Privacy, Licensing & Deployment Governance
Official Provider Release Intelligence, API Quotas & Agentic Specs
- Official API Model ID (SDK String)
- gpt-3-5-turbo
- Supported SDK & API Protocol
- OpenAI Responses API & Chat Completions v1
- Lifecycle & Deprecation Status
- Legacy Stable (Upgrade path available in OpenAI lineup)
- Production Rate Limits (RPM & TPM)
- 10,000 – 30,000 RPM (Tier 5 Enterprise) · 800,000 – 2,000,000 TPM
- Long-Context Pricing Tier (>128K / >200K)
- Flat rate ($0.5/1M in) across full 16K window
- Prompt Cache Write & TTL Policy
- Automatic prefix caching at $0.25/1M (no extra cache-write fee)
- Computer Use & Browser GUI Agent
- API / CLI Tool-Use & DOM Agent ready (no raw pixel desktop click loop)
- MCP & Parallel Tool Calling
- Native MCP Client/Server ready · Parallel function calling · 100% Strict JSON Schema
- Web Search Grounding & Code Sandbox
- Native Web Search tool + Hosted Code Interpreter & File Search RAG
- Fine-Tuning & Distillation Support
- Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference (DPO) & Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT)
- Multimodal Tokenization Billing
- Text BPE (~4 chars/token)
- Weights Precision & Quantization
- Cloud-Hosted Proprietary (FP8 / BF16 Tensor Core Cluster)
- Minimum GPU VRAM Requirement
- Zero Local VRAM Required (100% Serverless Cloud API)
- Supported Inference Engines
- Managed OpenAI Cloud API
- System Card & Safety Framework
- OpenAI Preparedness Framework Audited & System Card Published
- Enterprise Compliance (SOC2 / HIPAA / ZDR)
- SOC2 Type II · GDPR · Zero Data Retention (ZDR) & HIPAA BAA Available on Enterprise Tier
GPT-3.5 Turbo Cost, Context, Hardware & API Integration
For single-user chat, a $20/mo subscription caps your bill below this API volume.
Break-even point: ~222 requests/day equals $20/month.
Same Monthly Workload Cost Across Popular Reference Models
Live Prompt Paste Tokenizer & Cost Counter
Paste real system instructions, JSON schemas, or code to measure BPE token counts across tokenizers.
Hybrid Prompt Routing Cascade Simulator
Route routine queries to a fast lightweight model ($0.15/1M) and escalate only complex reasoning turns to GPT-3.5 Turbo:
Benchmark Scores & 6-Axis Capability Radar
- SWE-bench Verified
- 12.5%
- GPQA Diamond
- 28%
- MMLU-Pro
- 56.8%
- HumanEval
- 48.1%
- Chatbot Arena Elo
- 1115pts
Strengths
- Accessible, reliable conversational assistant that popularized generative AI globally
- 10x cost reduction compared to legacy GPT-3 Davinci
- Fast inference and broad developer integration
Limitations & Trade-offs
- Lacks vision and native multimodal understanding
- Lower reasoning and coding benchmark scores compared to GPT-4 class models
Editorial Assessment
The consumer catalyst that brought generative artificial intelligence into everyday life worldwide.
Best for: Everyday conversational chatbots, customer support routing, and high-volume text summarization
Compare GPT-3.5 Turbo
Frequently Asked Questions about GPT-3.5 Turbo
How much does the GPT-3.5 Turbo API cost per 1M tokens?+
GPT-3.5 Turbo by OpenAI is priced at $0.5 per 1M input tokens and $1.5 per 1M output tokens. With prompt caching enabled, cached input tokens cost $0.25 per 1M tokens, and asynchronous Batch API requests receive a 50% discount.
Should I use a $20/month subscription or the GPT-3.5 Turbo pay-as-you-go API?+
A flat $20/month consumer subscription is predictable for daily interactive chat and manual coding. However, if you are building software, running automated workflows, or sending low-to-moderate volume with prompt caching enabled, the pay-as-you-go API is typically far more cost-effective and offers higher rate limits without manual UI caps.
How many words and pages fit in GPT-3.5 Turbo's context window?+
GPT-3.5 Turbo features a 16K tokens context window, which equals approximately 12,289 English words or ~33 standard single-spaced pages in a single prompt. Its maximum output generation per turn is 4,096 tokens.
Can I run GPT-3.5 Turbo locally on my own GPU (Open Weights)?+
No, GPT-3.5 Turbo is a proprietary closed-weights model hosted by OpenAI. It cannot be downloaded for local GPU execution and must be accessed via OpenAI's official API or cloud platform.
Does OpenAI train on data sent to the GPT-3.5 Turbo API, and is commercial use allowed?+
API payloads are excluded from model training by default. License tier: Proprietary Commercial API (OpenAI Terms). Full commercial ownership of generated outputs. Supported deployment channels include: OpenAI Platform API, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Foundry.
How does GPT-3.5 Turbo perform on coding and reasoning benchmarks?+
GPT-3.5 Turbo achieves a composite Intelligence Index of 30/100, scoring 12.5% on SWE-bench Verified, 28% on GPQA Diamond, 56.8% on MMLU-Pro, and 1115 pts on Chatbot Arena Elo.
What is GPT-3.5 Turbo best used for?+
GPT-3.5 Turbo is best suited for: Everyday conversational chatbots, customer support routing, and high-volume text summarization. Assessment: The consumer catalyst that brought generative artificial intelligence into everyday life worldwide.
OpenAI Family Lineage, Routing Tiers & Upgrade Path
Step down to a lighter sibling for high-volume routing or step up to OpenAI's flagship reasoning tier:
GPT-6 Astra
GPT-6.1 Sol
GPT-6 Sol
GPT-6 Luna
GPT-5.6 Sol
GPT-5.6 Terra
AI Glossary & Architecture Concepts
View full glossary →Key machine learning concepts and benchmarks relevant to GPT-3.5 Turbo:
The basic unit of text that a language model processes, typically representing about 3 to 4 English characters or roughly 0.75 words. For example, the sentence "Artificial intelligence is fast" breaks down into about 5 tokens.
A standardized evaluation suite used to objectively measure and rank an AI model's capabilities across specific tasks — such as SWE-bench Verified for software engineering, AIME for competitive math, or MMLU for general knowledge.
The maximum number of tokens a model can consider at once — both the input it reads and the output it writes. A 1,000,000-token context window can hold roughly 750,000 English words in a single request.
The ability of a language model to recognize when an external capability is needed and output structured JSON arguments to invoke external APIs, databases, or terminal commands. The runtime executes the tool and passes results back to the model.
An open standard created by Anthropic that allows AI applications and agents to connect seamlessly to local filesystems, development environments, and third-party APIs via standardized server interfaces.
A cost and latency optimization where inference providers store pre-computed attention states for repeated prompt prefixes. Reusing cached tokens typically slashes API input costs by 50% to 90% and cuts TTFT substantially.
Benchmark scores, token prices, and rate limits evolve rapidly as AI labs release model updates. Always verify current specifications and pricing on the official provider documentation.