[Fixed] OpenAI Playground Speed Differences – GPT-3.5 API 30x Slower Than ChatGPT?

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Problem Formulation

I encountered a significant delay in the response times on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo API as compared to the ChatGPT — and I’m not alone with this (source). The latency is particularly noticeable when using certain accounts, with the delay making the API almost unusable for real-time applications.

Solution Idea: Experiment with Difference User Accounts to Prevent Throttling

When researching possible solutions to this problem, I discovered that a user experienced 30x performance differences across two different OpenAI API accounts’s playgrounds (source).

Here’s what happens if you ask for a full dictionary of a certain word using two different accounts from the same user at the same time (left fast, right slow):

This suggests that the issue might be account-specific or related to allocating server resources per account. It is likely that OpenAI experiments with various throttling ideas to improve the efficiency of resource allocation — we all have experienced times when demand for OpenAI’s models was too much to handle.

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