How do I send a GPT-4 API request from Python?

[Sachin9]

I am trying to build a simple AI chatbot using the GPT-4 API.

I created an API key but I don’t understand how to send a request from Python.

Can someone show a simple example?

[vb]

Hi and welcome to the community!

Have you tried the quickstart guide from the docs? If yes, can you share where you ran into an issue?

Developer quickstart | OpenAI API

[_j]

GPT-4 is an AI model, and you’ll likely want to start with gpt-5-nano for testing (and with a new organization where you have gone through “create building”, you might have minimal free usage before needing to prepay for credits.

Here’s sending a request, and the rest of API support for “build a simple AI chatbot” - by way of searching the forum.

@_j

If you still want to go at it, here’s some console Python chat code for you. It uses the previous response ID method and non-streaming simply because the alternate is massive event code and custom database, and supports nothing other than code interpreter. I just tacked the tool and support onto other example code I had open.

• A container ID is created but no other management of the lifecycle.
• Any files created that the AI cites for you will automatically be downloaded to a code-files sub-directory.
• There is a function to upload, but no interface to upload. You could hard-code a list of files to iterate over to upload to the container after it is created.
• exit, and the response IDs are cleaned from the server (and the container is allowed to expire).

@_j

"""Console chatbot: Conversations + Custom Tools + Persistent Memory

Demonstrates OpenAI's Responses API with:
- Server-side conversation state
- Custom tools (plain-text inputs/outputs)
- Cross-session memory storage
- Guaranteed cleanup of server-side artifacts

Requirements:
  pip install httpx
  export OPENAI_API_KEY="..."

Run:
  python chatbot_custom_tools_memory.py