OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has announced that ChatGPT users can now surf the web, expanding the chatbot’s knowledge beyond its previous cutoff date in September 2021.
The company said the new browsing feature will allow websites to control how ChatGPT interacts with their content.
“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 feature is currently available to Plus and Enterprise users, with plans to expand it to all users in the near future. Users can enable browsing by selecting “Browse with Bing” in the GPT-4 selector.
OpenAI also recently unveiled a significant update that enables ChatGPT to engage in voice conversations and interact with users using images, bringing it closer to popular AI assistants like Apple’s Siri.
Previously, OpenAI had tested a feature that allowed users to access the latest information through the Bing search engine within its premium ChatGPT Plus offering. However, this feature was later disabled due to concerns that it could enable users to bypass paywalls.
ChatGPT has experienced rapid growth and became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, reaching 100 million monthly active users in January before being surpassed by Meta’s Threads app.
This surge in popularity has attracted significant investor interest, with reports suggesting that OpenAI is in discussions with shareholders about selling existing shares at a much higher valuation than just a few months ago.
Additionally, OpenAI recently introduced Dall-E 3, the latest version of its text-to-image tool. Dall-E 3, which uses ChatGPT to assist with prompts, will be available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers in October via the API. Users can request images and refine prompts through conversations with ChatGPT. OpenAI has also provided creators with the option to opt out of having their work used to train future text-to-image tools.