Unfortunately, OpenAI's api offering has slowed down a lot and is extremely inconsistent in response times. (I'm assuming they are struggling to scale and/or sometimes you get session-ed up with a congested data centre)
This is a pretty common theme for the past few months in their community forums -> https://community.openai.com/t/api-gpt-3-5-turbo-sucks-slow/147230/8
If anyone knows a less congested alternative I would greatly appreciate it (don't mind if it's of lesser quality responses)
Claude is also under limited preview right now.
Also waiting for some reliable API which can be used in customer facing applications
2. Cohere
3. https://inferkit.com or https://textsynth.com/pricing.html