OpenAI text-davinci-003 (completions endpoint)
by OpenAI
Announced
2024-01-04
Complete
2024-01-04
Refund window closes
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Refund status
No refund applicable
text-davinci-003 was the most-capable completion-style model in OpenAI's GPT-3.5 family, released November 2022 and the default model for many production applications through 2023. It was deprecated on January 4, 2024 along with the broader GPT-3 base model family (curie, babbage, ada). Applications pinning to text-davinci-003 broke at the deprecation deadline; the migration path was to the chat-completion API with gpt-3.5-turbo or gpt-4.
Refund flow
- 1
Not applicable. OpenAI API is pay-as-you-go — no pre-paid credits tied to deprecated models.
Migration path
Recommended successor
gpt-3.5-turbo (for cost-equivalent) or gpt-4-turbo / gpt-4o (for quality)
Why this is the closest fit
Direct functional successors. gpt-3.5-turbo is approximately cost-equivalent to text-davinci-003 was. gpt-4 family is more capable at higher cost.
What differs from the original
Different API: chat-completion (messages array) vs completion (single prompt). Different prompt-style preferences. Different tokenizer (cl100k_base vs p50k_base) so token counts and pricing differ. Behavioral differences require prompt re-engineering for most applications.
What this tool meant
text-davinci-003 was the workhorse model for most production AI applications in 2023 — Jasper, Copy.ai, Notion AI, hundreds of GPT-3.5 wrappers and SaaS tools. Its deprecation marked the end of the completion-style API as the default; everything since has standardized on chat-completion. The deprecation was widely covered and most applications migrated cleanly before the deadline, but a long tail of legacy applications silently broke.
Sources
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