One of the main criticisms that ChatGPT has received since its launch is that the chatbot does not have an internet connection to get up-to-date information. As the service itself remembers every time we access it, in its list of restrictions “Limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021”, that is, your knowledge of everything that happened after 2021 is limited. OpenAI regularly updates its chatbot knowledge base, so we’re seeing improvements in that regard, but it’s still at a distinct disadvantage against Bing and, from what Google told us at Google I/O 2023, Bard.

Until now, the only way to enable ChatGPT was to explore current information by providing it upon request, either directly or through one of the many plugins for the browser that have appeared over the past few months. Granted, providing the links manually will ensure that it uses the information we want, but of course we have to look it up first. This can be useful if we want the chatbot to produce some text in relation to the given information, but it’s completely useless if what we were looking for was just the said information.

Thus, users of the service have been demanding that OpenAI fix this limitation for months, especially since competing services emerged that showed that this integration could be done without compromising the quality of the answers provided by the model. And besides the fact that ChatGPT users themselves were interested in this feature, the chatbot market itself forced OpenAI to take a step in this directionso it was only a matter of time.

The wait is over, if only for some (at least for now), as according to what we can read in the update log on the chatbot’s official blog, OpenAI has started rolling out web browsing functionality in ChatGPT Plusa chatbot payment method that, for a $20 monthly fee, provides access to some advanced features of the service, as well as priority access to it when the service is saturated.

The web browsing feature is starting to be deployed in the beta phase, so to activate it, you need to access the ChatGPT Plus configuration and beta features in it. And users who enter this section will find another very interesting news, and this is it ChatGPT plugins have moved from alpha to betaand you can request access to them through the same section. According to the post, the rollout has already started and will be completed for all premium accounts within the next week.