Unable to connect to OpenAI

Course Q&A AI Python for Beginners
1

Hi,
I have been trying to write a simple Python program to connect to OpenAI. I am not sure why it is not just working. I keep getting some errors. I have followed all the steps including creating the key on OpenAI. None of the errors messages are helpful. Any guidance will be helpful
Thanks

2

Hi @ramvij !
Could you be more specific about the error message? What’s the issue mentioned in the error message?

3

Thank you so much for responding. I have been trying to use the simple code from openAI to connect to OpenAI. I have tried multiple ways to pass the key and it keeps giving me a new error every time. Could you please advise on this. I have a MacBook air and have set the key value in the .env file. Each time I use the export command to set the environment variable
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI()
completion = client.chat.completions.create(
model=“gpt-4o”,
messages=[
{“role”: “user”, “content”: “write a haiku about ai”}
]
)

4

Hi,

You might want to consider creating a “client” in the following manner:

import os
client = OpenAI(
api_key=os.environ.get(“OPENAI_API_KEY”),
)

1 Like
5

Deeply appreciate your response, I did try what you mentioned. I still keep getting the below error
OpenAIError: The api_key client option must be set either by passing api_key to the client or by setting the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable

6

Hi，
If you don’t want to rely on environment variables, you can pass the API key directly when creating the client. Here’s how to modify your code:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
api_key=“your-api-key-here”
)

1 Like
7

The OpenAI library seems not to recognize your API key despite the setup. As @XinghaoZong mentioned, explicitly pass the API key in the code without relying on the environment variable. This will help confirm if the problem is with loading the environment variable. You can try the code like this:

import openai

# Directly assign your API key here
openai.api_key = "your-api-key-here"

completion = openai.ChatCompletion.create(
    model="gpt-4o",
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "write a haiku about AI"}
    ]
)

print(completion.choices[0].message["content"])

If it works, the problem is with the .env file or how it’s loaded.

1 Like
8

Thank you so much for your response. There were a couple of issues and thanks to @XinghoaZong’s guidance I was able to resolve them. I had an issue with the key and once I created a new key it worked. The second one was that the Jupyterlab was not able to read the environment variable. When I ran the code using the shell, it worked quite well. So going forward I felt that if I were to run the script in Jupyterlab, I will embed the key in the code. If I run the code using the shell, I will read the environment variable. Again thank you all for your guidance and follow up

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