⚡️The new OpenAI Agents Platform

**Alessio** (0:03)
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another Latent Space Lightning episode. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel, and I'm joined by Swyx, founder of Small AI.

**Nikunj** (0:11)
Hi.

**swyx** (0:12)
And today we have a super special episode because we're talking with our old friend, Roman. Hi, welcome.

**Romain** (0:19)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

**swyx** (0:20)
And Nikunj, who is most famously is, if anyone has ever tried to get any access to anything on the API, Nikunj is the guy. So I know your e-mails because I look forward to them.

**Nikunj** (0:31)
Yeah, nice to meet all of you.

**swyx** (0:32)
I think that we're basically convening today to talk about the new API. So perhaps you guys want to just kick off. What is OpenAI launching today?

**Nikunj** (0:40)
Yeah, so I can kick it off. We're launching a bunch of new things today. We're going to do three new built-in tools. So we're launching the Web Search tool. This is basically ChatGPT for search, but available in the API. We're launching an improved File Search tool. So this is you bringing your data to OpenAI, you upload it, we take care of parsing it, chunking it, embedding it, making it searchable, give you this ready vector store that you can use. So that's the File Search tool. Then we're also launching our computer use tool. So this is the tool behind the operator product in ChatGPT. So that's coming to developers today. To support all of these tools, we're going to have a new API. So we launched ChatCompletions, like I think March 2023 or so. It's been a while. So we're looking for an update over here to support all the new things that the models can do. So we're launching this new API called the Responses API.
It works with tools. We think it will be a great option for all the future agentic products that we build. So that is also launching today. Actually, the last thing we're launching is the agents SDK. We launched this thing called Swarm last year, where it was an experimental SDK for people to do multi-agent orchestration and stuff like that. It was supposed to be educational, experimental, but people really loved it. They ate it up. And so we were like, all right, let's upgrade this thing. Let's give it a new name. And so we're calling it the agents SDK. It's going to have built-in tracing in the OpenAI dashboard. So that's the cool stuff going out. So yeah, excited about it.

**Romain** (2:15)
That's a lot, but we said 2025 was the year of agents. So there you have it, a lot of new tools to build these agents for developers.

**swyx** (2:21)
Okay, I guess we'll just kind of go one by one and we'll leave the agents SDK towards the end. So Responses API, I think the sort of primary concern that people have and something I think I voiced to you guys when I was talking with you in the planning process was, is chat completion going your way? So I just wanted to let you guys respond to the concerns that people might have.

**Romain** (2:41)
Chat completion is definitely like here to stay. It's a bare metal API we've had for quite some time, lots of tools built around it. So we want to make sure that it's maintained and people can confidently keep on building on it. At the same time, it was kind of optimized for a different world, right? It was optimized for a free multi-modality world. We also optimized for kind of single turn, text prompt in, text response out. And now with these agentic workflows, we noticed that developers and companies want to build longer horizon tasks, you know, like things that require multiple turns to get the task accomplished. And computer use is one of those, for instance. And so that's why the Responses API came to life, to kind of support these new agentic workflows. But ChatCompletion is definitely here to stay.

**swyx** (3:27)
And Assistance API, we've had the target sunset date of first half of 2026 So this is kind of like, in my mind, there was a kind of very poetic mirroring of the API with the models. I kind of view this as like kind of the merging of Assistance API and ChatCompletions, right? Into one unified responses. So it's kind of like how GPT and all series models are also unifying.

**Romain** (3:48)
Yeah, that's exactly the right framing, right? I think we took the best of what we learned from the Assistance API, especially being able to access tools very conveniently. But at the same time, simplifying the way you have to integrate, you no longer have to think about six different objects to get access to these tools. With the Responses API, you just get one API request, and suddenly, you can sweep in those tools, right?