⚡️The new OpenAI Agents Platform

While everyone is now repeating that 2025 is the “Year of the Agent”, OpenAI is heads down building towards it. In the first 2 months of the year they released Operator and Deep Research (arguably the most successful agent archetype so far), and today they are bringing a lot of those capabilities to the API:

* Responses API

* Web Search Tool

* Computer Use Tool

* File Search Tool

* A new open source Agents SDK with integrated Observability Tools

We cover all this and more in today’s lightning pod on YouTube!

More details here:

Responses API

In our Michelle Pokrass episode we talked about the Assistants API needing a redesign. Today OpenAI is launching the Responses API, “a more flexible foundation for developers building agentic applications”. It’s a superset of the chat completion API, and the suggested starting point for developers working with OpenAI models.

One of the big upgrades is the new set of built-in tools for the responses API: Web Search, Computer Use, and Files.

Web Search Tool

We previously had Exa AI on the podcast to talk about web search for AI. OpenAI is also now joining the race; the Web Search API is actually a new “model” that exposes two 4o fine-tunes: gpt-4o-search-preview and gpt-4o-mini-search-preview. These are the same models that power ChatGPT Search, and are priced at $30/1000 queries and $25/1000 queries respectively.

The killer feature is inline citations: you do not only get a link to a page, but also a deep link to exactly where your query was answered in the result page.

Computer Use Tool

The model that powers Operator, called Computer-Using-Agent (CUA), is also now available in the API. The computer-use-preview model is SOTA on most benchmarks, achieving 38.1% success on OSWorld for full computer use tasks, 58.1% on WebArena, and 87% on WebVoyager for web-based interactions.

As you will notice in the docs, `computer-use-preview` is both a model and a tool through which you can specify the environment.

Usage is priced at $3/1M input tokens and $12/1M output tokens, and it’s currently only available to users in tiers 3-5.

File Search Tool

File Search was also available in the Assistants API, and it’s now coming to Responses too. OpenAI is bringing search + RAG all under one umbrella, and we’ll definitely see more people trying to find new ways to build all-in-one apps on OpenAI.

Usage is priced at $2.50 per thousand queries and file storage at $0.10/GB/day, with the first GB free.

Agent SDK: Swarms++!

https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-python

To bring it all together, after the viral reception to Swarm, OpenAI is releasing an officially supported agents framework (which was previewed at our AI Engineer Summit) with 4 core pieces:

* Agents: Easily configurable LLMs with clear instructions and built-in tools.

* Handoffs: Intelligently transfer control between agents.

* Guardrails: Configurable safety checks for input and output validation.

* Tracing & Observability: Visualize agent execution traces to debug and optimize performance.

Multi-agent workflows are here to stay!

OpenAI is now explicitly designs for a set of common agentic patterns: Workflows, Handoffs, Agents-as-Tools, LLM-as-a-Judge, Parallelization, and Guardrails. OpenAI previewed this in part 2 of their talk at NYC:

Further coverage of the launch from Kevin Weil, WSJ, and OpenAIDevs, AMA here.

Show Notes

* Assistants API

* Swarm (OpenAI)

* Fine-Tuning in AI

* 2024 OpenAI DevDay Recap with Romain

* Michelle Pokrass episode (API lead)

Timestamps

* 00:00 Intros

* 02:31 Responses API

* 08:34 Web Search API

* 17:14 Files Search API

* 18:46 Files API vs RAG

* 20:06 Computer Use / Operator API

* 22:30 Agents SDK

And of course you can catch up with the full livestream here:

Transcript

Alessio [00:00:03]: 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.

swyx [00:00:11]: Hi, and today we have a super special episode because we're talking with our old friend Roman. Hi, welcome.

Romain [00:00:19]: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

swyx [00:00:20]: And Nikunj, who is most famously, if anyone has ever tried to get any access to anything on the API, Nikunj is the guy. So I know your emails because I look forward to them.

Nikunj [00:00:30]: Yeah, nice to meet all of you.

swyx [00:00:32]: 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 [00:00:40]: 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 chat GPD 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, you know, take care of parsing it, chunking it. We're embedding it, making it searchable, give you this like ready vector store that you can use. So that's the file search tool. And then we're also launching our computer use tool. So this is the tool behind the operator product in chat GPD. So that's coming to developers today. And to support all of these tools, we're going to have a new API. So, you know, we launched chat completions, 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. And so we're launching this new API. It is, you know, it works with tools. We think i