OpenAI Gives ChatGPT Internet Access Through New Plugin System
OpenAI introduces a plugin system for ChatGPT that allows the AI to browse the web using Bing's search API. This major update breaks the bot's previous knowledge limit but introduces new risks regarding source reliability.
OpenAI expands the capabilities of its popular ChatGPT chatbot by launching a new plugin system that allows the AI to access the internet. The most significant addition is a first-party web-browsing plugin that uses the Bing search API to pull real-time information from the web, effectively ending the bot's previous limitation of only knowing events up to September 2021. When answering questions, ChatGPT now shows the websites it visits and cites its sources directly in its responses.
This major update is currently available only in alpha to a small group of developers and ChatGPT Plus subscribers on a waitlist. OpenAI plans to prioritize this limited group before expanding the rollout to a larger scale and eventually providing API access. Beyond web browsing, the plugin framework also allows ChatGPT to connect to other third-party knowledge sources and databases to further extend its usefulness.
Connecting a chatbot to the live internet presents significant safety challenges, as OpenAI's own past research with a system called WebGPT demonstrates. Unfiltered web access exposes the AI to unreliable sources, conspiracy theories, and offensive content, while also making it reliant on the biases and algorithms of search engines. Because search results are easily manipulated and often prioritize certain modern web technologies or proprietary services, ChatGPT's new web access introduces complex risks that OpenAI must carefully manage as the feature expands.