AWS Case Study 9: ChatGPT client running in AWS Lambda

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI that enables human-like conversations. Trained on vast amounts of text data, ChatGPT demonstrates an impressive ability to generate coherent and contextually relevant responses to user inputs.

ChatGPT can be utilized in various applications, including customer support, virtual assistance, and interactive conversational experiences, offering a powerful tool for natural language processing and communication with AI systems.

Can we integrate ChatGPT into our apps?

Yes, because ChatGPT has an API!

ChatGPT API offers a world of possibilities for integrating OpenAI's advanced language model into your own applications and services.

With the API, you can tap into the power of ChatGPT to facilitate natural language conversations and enhance user experiences. By sending a series of messages as input, you can receive model-generated responses in real-time, enabling dynamic and interactive interactions with the AI system.

Whether you want to build chatbots, virtual assistants, or other conversational interfaces, the ChatGPT API opens up a realm of creative opportunities, empowering you to leverage the state-of-the-art capabilities of ChatGPT within your own projects.

Is it difficult to integrate ChatGPT with our AWS Lambda function?

Integrating ChatGPT with your AWS Lambda function is a straightforward process.

OpenAI provides comprehensive documentation and resources to guide you through the integration steps. The key steps typically involve setting up an AWS Lambda function, making API requests to the ChatGPT API endpoint, and processing the responses in your Lambda function to provide conversational outputs.

To make things even more easy for you, in this article you can find a link to download my bulletproof step by step guide that will teach you how you can set up your own ChatGPT client in AWS Lambda in under 15 minutes.

Let's create our own ChatGPT client running inside AWS Lambda function

The architecture behind our solution is going to be the following:

Notes:

• the architecture is not a rocket science, as you can see from the diagram above, we are going to need just a single AWS Lambda function deployed in the AWS Cloud;
• this Lambda function will represent both frontend and backend layers;
• if this Lambda function is invoked via the GET request, it provides the web browser with a simple HTML application skeleton;
• if this Lambda function is invoked via the POST request, it connects to the ChatGPT API and retrieves answer to the question user asked;
• HTML application skeleton utilizes simple JQuery code written in JavaScript that submits user's question to the ChatGPT API and renders the response it receives on the web page;
• since we are going to use AWS Lambda function URL feature, we don't need to setup Amazon API Gateway endpoint;

Source code

The source code of the ChatGPT client can be downloaded as ZIP file.

ZIP archive consists of 3 files:

• index.js - core logic, GET/POST requests handler,
• index.html - HTML skeleton (frontend layer),
• functions.js - helper functions.

The source code relies on the environment variable: OPENAI_API_KEY, that you need to configure to provide your secret ChatGPT API key to AWS Lambda function.

As the response from ChatGPT API can be sometimes slower, AWS Lambda function should count with that - don't forget to reconfigure the execution timeout value of your AWS Lambda function and change it from its default 3 seconds to at least 15 seconds.

Step by step instructions

The step by step instructions can be downloaded from here.

Before you start following them, please make sure you have already your own account registered at Amazon AWS and OpenAI.

In case you don't have, you can use these links to register both accounts:

• Sign up page for an AWS account,
• Sign up page for an OpenAI account.

AWS Lambda ChatGPT client application

After you have followed the instructions, you may visit your AWS Lambda function URL using your web browser either on a PC or from your mobile phone.

In case you did everything as instructed, AWS Lambda ChatGPT client successfully loads into your web browser and you can use it to ask ChatGPT your own questions!

Final thoughts

Please be aware that the ChatGPT client application that we have just built is far from being ready for productive use, consider it more like a Hello world! API integration example which helps you get started.

It is mainly due to the following 2 reasons:

1. application doesn't provide to its users any new added value - when you compare it to the existing OpenAI.com's ChatGPT web interface, the truth is that our application offers even less capabilities,
2. access to the application is not limited (based on user's IP address or by any other means) and in case you are using paid ChatGPT API integration, when you expose this application to the public internet it may infer substantial costs if it becomes misused.

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