OpenAI has restored ChatGPT‘s internet browsing capability. Users with a ChatGPT Plus subscription or an Enterprise account, who have access to GPT-4, can now have the AI tool browse the internet to find the latest or more relevant information. The feature isn’t available for free users, who are currently limited to GPT-3.5.
ChatGPT regains its internet browsing feature
ChatGPT is a powerful AI tool that has answers to pretty much all of your questions. However, it comes with a massive limitation. Its knowledge pool is limited to data before September 2021. OpenAI used data up to that point to train the AI model. If you ask ChatGPT about something that happened after that cutoff date, it can’t answer you or give you accurate information.
To solve this problem and make the AI tool more useful, OpenAI introduced a browsing and search feature to ChatGPT Plus earlier this year. The feature used Microsoft’s Bing search engine to look up current information on the web. However, shortly after its rollout, the company pulled the feature back because of unexpected behaviors. The tool could pull up full text from given URLs, including paywalled ones.
OpenAI said ChatGPT’s internet browsing capability will be back after it fixes this issue. It took the company almost three months, but the feature is now here again. The official announcement notes that any information that the tool pulls up from the web will contain a direct link to the source article. It will no longer simply extract the full text from an article and present it to users without requiring them to click on any links.
Since this feature is still in beta, it may not always work properly. Nonetheless, if you have a ChatGPT Plus subscription and are willing to try out the tool’s browsing capability, you can enable it from settings. Go to “Profile & Settings” and select “Beta features.” Now toggle the “Browse with Bing” button on. Once enabled, you can choose “Browse with Bing” in the selector under GPT-4 and start browsing the internet through ChatGPT.
OpenAI plans to bring the feature to the free version of ChatGPT
Internet browsing may be exclusive to ChatGPT Plus currently, but it won’t remain so for long. OpenAI has already confirmed that the feature will roll out to free users as well. However, it hasn’t made it clear whether free users will get access to GPT-4 or internet browsing will come to GPT -3.5. We presume it’s the latter since the paywalled GPT-4 offers many other premium features. We will let you know once OpenAI shares more information.
2023-09-30 15:05:44