OpenAI Finally Allows ChatGPT Complete Internet Access

OpenAI’s world-famous chatbot is free to rummage through the internet’s darkest corners. The company declared Tuesday that the “Browse with Bing” feature is ready for prime time for those ChatGPT users paying for Plus or Enterprise editions. This lets ChatGPT access up-to-date information, rather than being limited to the training data that was cut off before September 2021.

There are several existing plugins and applications that give ChatGPT access to the internet though this official release signals the company thinks its AI’s ethical constraints can withstand open access to the best and worst the internet has to offer. The new feature is available on both web and mobile version to those customers who pay the $20 monthly subscription.

ChatGPT is already a feature in Microsoft’s Bing browser, so there’s quite a lot of cross-pollination going on. In that vein, OpenAI’s new AI image generator DALL-E 3 already has ChatGPT integration. The company said Monday it would stick DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT letting users create all the deepfakes and silly art they want through the chatbot’s UI.

OpenAI’s big partner in crime, Microsoft, first announced this feature was entering its beta phase back in May during its annual Microsoft Build conference. A few months later OpenAI smashed the pause button on Browse with Bing saying it was displaying content “in ways we don’t want.” Though in actuality the AI company might have nixed the feature after it learned users were managing to bypass its paywall.

It took the company until September to re-release Browse with Bing. That update also added new speech-to-text capabilities that let paying users talk directly to the chatbot. ChatGPT can now respond to prompts using an AI-synthesized voice. In addition, the bot can comprehend images and respond to users’ queries based on information within a picture.

While ChatGPT might be able to identify the parts of a bicycle, it has a harder time interpreting people. One thread on the r/ChatGPT subreddit asked the chatbot to identify the social dynamics of two images taken from a sexual harassment training course. An obviously unwanted hand on a woman’s shoulder was interpreted as a man “offering comfort or reassurance.”

With competition from all over knocking at its door, OpenAI continues to add features at a breakneck pace. In November, the company is reportedly planning to add more memory storage and vision capabilities to the enterprise developer model of ChatGPT. These updates could be announced at the company’s developer conference on Nov. 6.