Hey everyone,
I’m running into a really frustrating limitation with fine-tuned models and API, and I’m hoping there’s a solution I’m missing.
In my SaaS product, some users can plug in their own OpenAI API key. This lets them keeping full control of their AI usage and pay less for my product.
The problem is: my core feature relies on my own fine-tuned model, and users with their own key cannot use it, because OpenAI doesn’t allow a fine-tuned model to be shared or accessed across different API keys.
This creates a huge blocker.
I can’t ask every user to fine-tune their own model, it’s slow, expensive for them, create lot of friction and produces inconsistent results.
What I really need is a way for other API keys to access my fine-tuned model, whether by making it public, shareable, assignable to authorized keys, or any mechanism that solves the problem.
Right now this limitation makes it really hard to build SaaS products that mix user-owned keys with custom fine-tuned models.
Is there any workaround or upcoming update on this?
Because at this point it’s a pretty painful limitation for developers.
Thanks.
P.S. I’ve already seen some posts asking for this, some going back nearly two years… but nothing seems to have changed…
Essentially yes, nothing has changed about how fine-tuning AI models operate.
To clarify your nomenclature: models are assets of an organization. They can be accessed for inference via organization projects and the keys created in those projects as authentication mechanism. You can list them on the models endpoint. The “jobs” of creating them is scoped to a project.
While there are other mechanics that would appeal to a very small set of organization administrators, such as inviting “members” to the org with dangerous autonomy, essentially one rule is true that is applicable to you: there is no way to utilize your existing fine-tuning AI model without it also being billed to you.
I suppose you might rethink your vertical a bit: Why would you offer direct consumption of OpenAI, missing your own opportunity for margin, making it clear that you are merely a bypassable wrapper? Further, then a desire to give your work away for free by offering models you paid to train on your creative efforts?
If you want to consult, I would instead expand the portfolio, “we can leverage our expertise in fine-tuning AI models to your own organization, providing customized training sets, and offering direct integration services of custom AI models into your OpenAI organization when a member of your organization”. Revelation of the training data in such a scenario is hard to avoid, though.
Sharing an API key for use within clients is dangerous - “send any input that will get us banned” - I hope you aren’t doing that currently with your “API KEY” input box.
One approach is to use service accounts, which you can create along with their API keys for an organization’s project using an admin API key.
In essence, you would run a small service where your users can request an API key and, yes, spend from your credit balance. I suggest reviewing the production and safety best practices before moving ahead.