OpenAI PHP package throws exception when requesting list format from GPT-3.5-turbo

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1

I’m getting an error when using the OpenAI PHP client with Laravel. The problem happens when I make a request to the GPT-3.5-turbo model and expect a list response back.

Here’s the error message I’m seeing:

WARNING: Undefined array key "choices" in 
vendor/openaiphp/client/src/Responses/Completions/CreateResponse.php on line 45

TypeError: array_map(): Argument #2 ($array) must be of type array, null given

This is the test code I’m running:

use OpenAI\Laravel\Facades\OpenAI;

$response = OpenAI::completions()->create([
    'model' => 'gpt-3.5-turbo',
    'prompt' => 'Name 5 biggest companies worldwide',
]);

The error seems to indicate that the response structure is missing the expected “choices” key. Has anyone encountered this issue before? Any ideas on how to resolve this?

2

You’re hitting a common issue with the OpenAI PHP client. GPT-3.5-turbo is built for chat interactions, not the old completions format. Use the chat() method instead of completions(). Structure your request with a messages array and put your prompt as a user message. I ran into this same problem recently - switching methods fixed the weird response structure issues.

3

This happens because the OpenAI PHP package expects different response formats for each endpoint. When you call completions() with GPT-3.5-turbo, you get a chat-formatted response that breaks the completions parser. The completions endpoint was built for older models like text-davinci-003. I hit this exact TypeError last month during a migration. Fix is simple - swap completions() for chat() and structure your prompt as a message array with role and content keys. That way the response matches what the PHP client expects.

4

totally agree, using the chat method is the way to go! that completions thing is really outdated for gpt-3.5-turbo. switching to OpenAI::chat()->create() with the right message format helped me out too when i faced that issue.