10/15/25, 7:43 PM Key concepts - OpenAI API
Copy page
Key concepts
Key concepts to understand when working with the OpenAI API.
At OpenAI, protecting user data is fundamental to our mission. We do not train our models on
inputs and outputs through our API. Learn more on our API data privacy page.
Text generation models
OpenAI's text generation models (often referred to as generative pre-trained transformers or
"GPT" models for short), like GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, have been trained to understand natural and
formal language. Models like GPT-4 allows text outputs in response to their inputs. The inputs
to these models are also referred to as "prompts". Designing a prompt is essentially how you
"program" a model like GPT-4, usually by providing instructions or some examples of how to
successfully complete a task. Models like GPT-4 can be used across a great variety of tasks
including content or code generation, summarization, conversation, creative writing, and
more. Read more in our introductory text generation guide and in our
prompt engineering guide.
Embeddings
An embedding is a vector representation of a piece of data (e.g. some text) that is meant to
preserve aspects of its content and/or its meaning. Chunks of data that are similar in some
way will tend to have embeddings that are closer together than unrelated data. OpenAI offers
text embedding models that take as input a text string and produce as output an embedding
vector. Embeddings are useful for search, clustering, recommendations, anomaly detection,
classification, and more. Read more about embeddings in our embeddings guide.
Tokens
Text generation and embeddings models process text in chunks called tokens. Tokens
represent commonly occurring sequences of characters. For example, the string "
tokenization" is decomposed as " token" and "ization", while a short and common word like "
the" is represented as a single token. Note that in a sentence, the first token of each word
typically starts with a space character. Check out our tokenizer tool to test specific strings and
https://platform.openai.com/docs/concepts 1/2
10/15/25, 7:43 PM Key concepts - OpenAI API
see how they are translated into tokens. As a rough rule of thumb, 1 token is approximately 4
characters or 0.75 words for English text.
One limitation to keep in mind is that for a text generation model the prompt and the
generated output combined must be no more than the model's maximum context length. For
embeddings models (which do not output tokens), the input must be shorter than the model's
maximum context length. The maximum context lengths for each text generation and
embeddings model can be found in the model index.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/concepts 2/2
