List available models

[kieran-mace]

When using the package, I don't know what to ask for when specifying a model.

For example, if I want to start chat with openAI's o3 model, I don't know if I should specify:

chat = chat_openai(model = 'o3')

or something else.

What may be useful is some sort of available_models('openai') function to help a user navigate this option.

[zilinskyjan]

Well, the models accessible via the API change over time, so my first reaction was that it may not be a natural ellmer functionality to scrape the provider's website and look for model names.

By perhaps something like current_models('openai') could print a message such as: "See the current list at: https://platform.openai.com/docs/models#current-model-aliases " (though again these URLs could change...)

[hadley]

@zilinskyjan most of the providers have an API for listing the available models.

[ries9112]

This would be a great feature not only for knowing what models are available, but also for ellmer to allow for other models. I'm trying to use sonnet 3.7 and it's not supported yet, but I would think in this case if it just allowed for the text 3.7 instead of 3.5 it would likely not need any other code changes to support it. And I think reducing the overhead and not having to push constant updates to support new models would be really desirable here.

Would the team welcome a PR going in this direction or is that a path that would not be desirable?

[hadley]

@ries9112 sonnet 3.7 is already supported.

I don't think there's much point in doing a PR until #331 is complete, because that sketches out a lot of the infrastructure that needs to happen first.

[ries9112]

Yes sorry I just came back to say I just had the wrong model name apologies. And sounds great. Super small note but this page doesn't have the #> Using model = "gpt-4o". part like chat_openai reference which I would have found helpful. Thank you for the work on ellmer, finding it to be a really fantastic package 🙌