ChatGPT users will now be able to surf the web, Microsoft-backed OpenAI said expanding the data the viral chatbot can access beyond its earlier September 2021 cutoff.
The artificial intelligence startup said its latest browsing feature would allow websites to control how ChatGPT can interact with them.
“Browsing is available to Plus and Enterprise users today, and we’ll expand to all users soon. To enable, choose Browse with Bing in the selector under GPT-4,” OpenAI said in a post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
The artificial intelligence-powered system was previously trained only using data up to September 2021. The move means some premium users will be able to ask the chatbot questions about current affairs and access news. OpenAI said the feature would open up to all users soon.
Earlier in the week, OpenAI also revealed the chatbot will soon be able to have voice conversations with users. ChatGPT and other similar systems use huge amounts of data to create convincing human-like responses to user queries.
Until now the viral chatbot’s “knowledge” has been frozen in time. Its database has been drawn from the contents of the internet as it was in September 2021. It could not browse the net in real-time. ChatGPT’s inability to take recent events into account has been a turn-off for some potential users.
READ MORE: Now you can chat with ChatGPT using your voice
The startup also announced a major update earlier this week that would enable ChatGPT to have voice conversations with users and interact with them using images, moving it closer to popular AI assistants like Apple’s Siri.
OpenAI had earlier tested a feature that allowed users to access the latest information through the Bing search engine within its premium ChatGPT Plus offering. But it later disabled it because of fears that it could allow users to bypass paywalls.
ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer application in history earlier this year, reaching 100 million monthly active users in January, before being supplanted by Meta’s Threads app.
Its rise has driven up investor interest in OpenAI, with media reporting that the startup is talking to shareholders about a possible sale of existing shares at a much higher valuation than a few months ago.
