OpenAI Grants ChatGPT Web Access Through New Plugin System
OpenAI introduces a plugin system for ChatGPT that allows the AI to browse the internet and pull from third-party databases. The web-browsing feature relies on Bing's search API to provide up-to-date answers, though it introduces new risks regarding source reliability.
OpenAI expands the capabilities of its popular AI chatbot by launching a new plugin system that allows ChatGPT to access the internet. The most significant addition is a first-party web-browsing plugin, which uses the Bing search API to pull real-time information from the web and cite its sources directly in responses. This update solves the AI's previous limitation of having a knowledge cutoff date around September 2021.
The plugin feature is currently available in an alpha phase exclusively to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and a small group of developers on a waitlist. OpenAI plans to expand access to more users and provide API availability in the future. Beyond web browsing, the plugin architecture also allows the chatbot to connect to various third-party knowledge sources and databases to expand its overall utility.
Connecting a language model to the live internet presents significant safety challenges, as past experiments by OpenAI and Meta show that AI models easily cite unreliable sources or adopt conspiracy theories. Because search engine algorithms prioritize certain modern web technologies and often promote their own services, ChatGPT's new web access heavily depends on the biases and filtering mechanisms of Bing's search results rather than the unfiltered web.