xAI has released documentation for its Responses API, which serves as the primary interface for text generation, reasoning, and tool use. This API supports generating responses based on text or image prompts, with the Grok-4.6 model performing the generation.
Responses created through the API are stored for 30 days before being permanently deleted. The API also includes functionality for retrieving previously generated responses, listing input items, deleting responses, and compacting context windows for continued conversations.
Key Points
- The Responses API is the primary interface for text generation, reasoning, and tool use, according to xAI.
- It generates responses based on text or image prompts using the Grok-4.6 model.
- Responses are stored for 30 days and then permanently deleted.
- The API supports a maximum of 128 tools, including functions and web search.
- Users can retrieve, list input items for, delete, and compact responses.
- Context compaction allows shrinking a full context window for reuse in subsequent calls.
Context
The Responses API from xAI allows for various operations, including creating, retrieving, listing input items for, deleting, and compacting responses. According to xAI, the API supports asynchronous processing of responses in the background. It also provides parameters to control how the model chooses tools and specifies the number of most likely tokens to return at each token position, from 0 to 8. The API does not support frequency or presence penalties for new tokens.
Separately, xAI's Collections API manages collections and documents, with a base URL shared with the Management API. This API allows for defining field definitions for documents, listing documents within a collection, and filtering results based on various criteria such as collection_id, collection_name, created_at, and documents_count. Document-level fields are validated against the collection's field definitions, ensuring required fields are present and unique fields remain unique.
Why It Matters
Builders can use the xAI Responses API to integrate advanced text generation, reasoning, and tool-use capabilities into their applications, leveraging the Grok-4.6 model. The 30-day storage period for responses and the context compaction feature offer practical considerations for managing conversation history and optimizing API calls.
What To Do
- Review the xAI documentation for the Responses API to understand the full range of text generation and tool-use capabilities.
- Note the 30-day retention policy for responses and plan data management strategies accordingly.
- Explore the context compaction feature to optimize long-running conversations with the API.
- Examine the supported tools, including functions and web search, and consider how they can be integrated into applications.