OpenAI connects ChatGPT to the World Wide Web via a plugin. This will greatly expand ChatGPT’s knowledge of current events.

OpenAI announces the first set of plugins for ChatGPT. We created two ourselves, and nine other plug-ins come from third-party providers. Adding plugins will expand ChatGPT’s capabilities even further and the AI ​​assistant will also be able to perform actions like shopping and restaurant reservations for you.

The most notable plug-in is the ability to search the web for additional information related to your question. To this end, ChatGPT will use a Bing API to perform searches through Microsoft’s search engine when it deems it necessary. In the example below, OpenAI shows how ChatGPT handles a question about the recent Oscars.

Current knowledge

The ability to perform autonomous searches eliminates one of ChatGPT’s biggest limitations: its lack of up-to-date knowledge. The underlying GPT-4 model has always been trained on a structural database containing information up to and including the year 2021. The chatbot knows little about what happened after that. Now ChatGPT is constantly updated with updated information.

OpenAI recognizes that this also comes with the necessary risks. The internet is also full of less reliable sources of information. ChatGPT will likely rely on Bing search first results, but that’s no guarantee that it will always return quality sources.

As a result, so-called “hallucinations”, in which the AI ​​completely misses the target, could actually occur more frequently. ChatGPT explicitly shows what resources it has used. The company explains in detail how OpenAI deals with this in a recently published risk analysis on GPT-4, which you can read here.

actions instead of words

Another plugin developed by OpenAI allows ChatGPT to better interpret Python code. This is intended to help the AI ​​in solving math problems, data analysis and visualization, and file conversion.

It doesn’t stop there. OpenAI also allows third parties to develop plugins for ChatGPT. Companies that have already done this include Klarna, Instacart and Expedia. This makes many new applications possible.

For example, ask your ChatGPT for culinary inspiration, it can immediately do the necessary shopping and direct you to the right page to pay. If you are looking for a restaurant nearby, ChatGPT is happy to make an online reservation. The plugins will be available first for paying ChatGPT Plus users.