Temperature

What it means

A generation setting that influences how predictable or varied a model's responses are.

Code example

const res = await openai.chat.completions.create({
  model: "gpt-4o",
  temperature: 0.2, // low = predictable, high = creative
  messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Summarize this article" }],
});

Why it matters

It helps control response variation; lower values generally produce more predictable outputs and higher values encourage more variation.

When to use it

• Chatbots (low)
• Creative writing (high)
• Code generation (low)

Further reading

• OpenAI Chat API Reference