One of the main criticisms that ChatGPT has received since its launch is that the chatbot does not have an Internet connection to obtain recent information . As the service itself remembers every time we access it, in its list of limitations, “Limited knowledge of world and events after 2021”, that is, that your knowledge of everything that happened after 2021 is limited. OpenAI regularly updates the knowledge base of its chatbot, so we see improvements in this regard, but even so, it is at a clear disadvantage against Bing and, according to what Google told us at Google I/O 2023, against Bard . ..
Until now, the only way to make ChatGPT able to browse recent information was to provide it at prompts, either directly, or through one of the many browser plugins that have appeared in recent months. It is true that manually providing the links ensures that it will use the information we want, but of course, for this we will first have to search for them. Thus, this can be useful if we want the chatbot to create some text in relation to said information, but it is totally useless if what we were looking for was only said information.
Thus, users of the service have been demanding that OpenAI correct this limitation for months, especially since the appearance of rival services that have shown that this integration can be carried out without compromising the quality of the responses provided by the model. And beyond the fact that the users of ChatGPT themselves were the ones who were interested in this functionality, the chatbot market itself forced OpenAI to take a step in this direction , so it was only a matter of time.
The wait is over, although only for some (at least for now) since, according to what we can read in the update log of the chatbot’s official blog, OpenAI has started to deploy the web browsing function in ChatGPT Plus , the modality of payment of the chatbot that, for a monthly fee of 20 dollars, provides access to some advanced functions of the service, as well as priority access to it when the service is saturated.
The web browsing function is beginning to be deployed in the beta phase, so it is necessary to access the ChatGPT Plus configuration and, in it, the beta functions, in order to activate it. And users who access this section will find another very interesting novelty, which is that the ChatGPT add-ons have gone from alpha to beta , and access to them can be requested through that same section. According to the post, the rollout has already started, and it will be completed for all premium accounts within the next week.