Infrastructure · Established · Beginner

AI API

A hosted interface that lets applications send prompts and receive model outputs without running any infrastructure.

What AI API is

Model APIs turned AI into a utility. You send messages, tools and settings, and receive tokens, usually billed per thousand tokens in and out.

How it works

Requests are authenticated with keys held server-side, streamed back to clients, and protected with rate limits, retries and cost caps. Production systems abstract the provider so models can be swapped or failed over.

Why it matters

API economics — price per token, latency, rate limits and context length — shape product design more than most teams expect.

Common uses

→Adding AI features to existing products
→Batch content and data processing
→Agent tool backends

Strengths

✓No infrastructure to run
✓Immediate access to frontier models
✓Scales elastically

Watch for

✓Ongoing per-use cost
✓Vendor and version dependence
✓Data leaves your environment

Continue exploring

Inference Open-Weight Model LLMOps (2)Data Privacy in AI