OpenAI gives ChatGPT access to the entire internet. In this way, the chatbot’s knowledge now extends beyond September 2021, which was the case until today.

OpenAI trained ChatGPT on data collected from the internet up to and including September 2021. The existing knowledge of the generative AI chatbot therefore does not extend beyond this. The bot can handle more recent issues, but you’ll need to add them to the prompt yourself. OpenAI is now changing that for paying users: the AI ​​model gains direct access to the entire Internet and thus also to current data. OpenAI revealed this itself on X (Twitter).

Just like you and me, ChatGPT is looking for an answer to a current question. However, with the chatbot it is a lot faster. Furthermore, unlike most flesh-and-blood humans, the bot uses Bing as its search engine. You will then receive an answer that is theoretically more current and correct than would be the case without internet access. The functionality of ChatGPT is more similar to that of Bing Chat from Microsoft, which is actually based on the same basis Great language model based.

Waiting for availability

ChatGPT already had access to the Internet a few months ago, albeit through third-party plugins. This time the functionality is integrated into the AI ​​tool itself. Basically, you can activate Internet access according to the GPT 4 model at the top of the chat window if you have a ChatGPT Plus account. In practice, we are unable to verify the existence of this feature and ChatGPT currently continues to use GPT-4 to claim no access to the Internet or current data.