ChatGPT Can Now Browse The Web

What you need to know:

1. ChatGPT can now access the internet to provide current information.
2. This feature is available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users.
3. Differences between ChatGPT and Bing Chat explained.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been a powerful tool since its release in November 2022. However, it had a limitation—it only knew information up to September 2021. But that’s changing now.

OpenAI recently announced that ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with up-to-date and reliable information, including direct links to sources. This new capability is made possible through integration with Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

This feature is available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and ChatGPT Enterprise users. You can choose it from the drop-down menu under the GPT-4 selector at the top of the application.

Interestingly, this marks a return to web browsing for ChatGPT. In March, when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT third-party plugins, they also announced their own plugins—Code Interpreter (now called “Advanced Data Analysis,” allowing ChatGPT to work with uploaded files) and “Browsing.” The browsing plugin used Microsoft’s Bing API and a text-based browser to search the web and summarize information, including clickable superscript citations.

OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT’s web browsing feature in March 2023. However, it was temporarily disabled a few days later because users were using it to bypass paywalls on news websites. It has now returned, with exclusions for those sites. ChatGPT can recognize the “robots.txt” code that website owners use to exclude search engines from indexing their content.

The return of web browsing for public, non-paywalled sites was celebrated by OpenAI’s leadership, including CEO Sam Altman and CTO Mira Murati, on their personal X accounts.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s Bing Chat, introduced in February, is powered by a more advanced OpenAI model and offers similar web browsing capabilities with citations.

So, what are the differences between using Bing Chat powered by OpenAI and using ChatGPT browsing with Bing Chat? Sources familiar with the situation say that the ChatGPT interface allows users to browse the web without leaving it, along with its other features.

These new ChatGPT web browsing capabilities come shortly after OpenAI announced ChatGPT’s ability to analyze images, conduct audio conversations, and generate voice responses. OpenAI also introduced its new image generation model, DALL-E 3, which takes advantage of ChatGPT’s natural language processing and conversational skills.

What does this mean: This update means that ChatGPT can now provide current internet information to users, making it a more powerful and versatile tool. It also indicates OpenAI’s commitment to improving and expanding ChatGPT’s capabilities for a variety of uses.

ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information.