ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, can now search the internet on its own, according to parent company OpenAI in a post on X (previously Twitter) on Wednesday.
“ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources,” the company wrote in a platform thread, explaining that the wildly popular chatbot was “no longer limited to data before September 2021” as a result of integration with Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
While the new functionality is now only available to paying subscribers, the business stated that it aims to make it available to all users “soon,” after receiving “useful feedback” from a prior failed attempt to give the massive language model access to the actual internet.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman retweeted his company’s announcement from his own account on X, declaring “we are so back.”
ChatGPT briefly offered web browsing back in March, only to disable the feature when it was discovered that it was being used to bypass website paywalls. That loophole has since been closed, according to OpenAI, which explained that the bot now obeys websites’ ‘robots.txt’ code preventing unwanted indexing.
Several people who responded to the promotional posts on X wanted to know what “authoritative” information is. ChatGPT’s initial release sparked hundreds of news stories and social network posts criticising the AI’s apparent political prejudices, which looked to match those of its Silicon Valley surroundings and were tough to overcome.
Since February, Microsoft Bing has been running its own huge language model, which it claims is “more powerful than ChatGPT.” For several months, the AI, which made news early on for its weirdly clinging behaviour towards its users, has allowed online browsing.
OpenAI showed earlier this week that ChatGPT might be used to scan and analyse photos as well as hold audio chats in the future. Dall-E 3, a new iteration of the company’s image generation AI, was also unveiled.
On Wednesday, the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise section was found to be hard at work on a ChatGPT clone capable of transmitting sourced information obtained from active internet open source intelligence streams. Langley’s bot, unlike OpenAI’s revised model, will be limited to the 18 agencies that form the US intelligence complex.
While OpenAI maintains that it does not accept “high risk” government or military contracts, a recent $13 billion investment by Microsoft allowed that corporate behemoth – and its clients in the intelligence community – access to some of OpenAI’s most prized AI technologies.
