OpenAI Supercharges ChatGPT by Adding Web-Browsing Support

When you use the ChatGPT website, the AI-powered chatbot is generally confined to only pulling knowledge from its own internal servers. But not anymore.

OpenAI today introduced a browsing capability to ChatGPT, meaning it can read information from across the web, including the latest news and data, to help it answer your request. 

The browsing ability promises to make ChatGPT even more useful, given that the program was only trained on public knowledge up until September 2021. Now you can ask it a question about current events, and the AI bot will be able to return an answer.

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This also means ChatGPT can essentially conduct research for you by searching the internet for the information, and then analyzing the results. In a demo from OpenAI, the company showed ChatGPT reading the latest news about itself and summing up the main points.

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The browsing capability is made possible through ChatGPT’s new support for plugins(Opens in a new window). OpenAI built two plugins, one for the browser and a second one that can translate commands into Python computer code. This can be used for performing data analysis, solving math problems, or converting files between formats.  

In addition, OpenAI invited several third-party internet services to create their own plugins for ChatGPT. They include Expedia, OpenTable, Instacart, Slack, Shopify, and Kayak among others. In another demo(Opens in a new window), the company showed you can install several plugins, and then ask ChatGPT to recommend a restaurant via OpenTable while also creating a shopping list to cook a separate meal using Instacart.

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The plugin support makes the chatbot a stronger rival to Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing, which can also search the web for current information. In a sense, OpenAI also created an app store for ChatGPT by enabling third-party plugins, though it currently has only a dozen options.

Be careful, though: ChatGPT can still come up with wrong answers. There’s also the scary prospect of bad actors abusing the plugins to make it easier to conduct malicious schemes on a wider scale through ChatGPT, as OpenAI acknowledges.

“At the same time, there’s a risk that plugins could increase safety challenges by taking harmful or unintended actions, increasing the capabilities of bad actors who would defraud, mislead, or abuse others,” the company said.

For now, OpenAI is only rolling out the plugin support for a small number of users, mainly developers and users of the paid ChatGPT Plus service. The company also added some safeguards to prevent abuse of the plugins, although OpenAI didn’t elaborate on that.

Interested users can request access to the plugin capability and get on a waitlist(Opens in a new window). OpenAI also published documentation(Opens in a new window) on how software developers can build third-party plugins to interface with ChatGPT. Along with this, OpenAI built another plugin developers can use to make ChatGPT retrieve and analyze files, such as notes, emails, and public documentation, from within a database.