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⚡️The new OpenAI Agents Platform
Description
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:
* 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 wit