Through a brand-new plugin feature that was developed by OpenAI, the artificial intelligence chatbot known as ChatGPT is now able to interact with websites owned by third parties and obtain information from online sources.
The plugin feature is still in its “limited” alpha stage, so it will initially only be available to a select few users before expanding to more users. In an announcement made on March 23, the company stated that in order to access the new feature on Chat GPT Plus, users must add themselves to a waitlist.
There will only be 11 plugins available initially. These plugins range from permitting clients to really look at the scores of live sporting events to booking an international flight and buying food for home delivery. The company added that it is “gradually rolling out plugins” to evaluate its real-world use.
“Plugins are tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle, and help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services,” said OpenAI.
E-commerce platforms Shopify, Klarna, and Instacart, as well as travel search engines Expedia and KAYAK, are among the group of websites that are supported by the new plugin feature.
How does it access the web?
ChatGPT searches for data using the Bing API and a text-based web browser to browse results and interact with websites.
It can combine information from multiple sources to provide a response that is more grounded. It also lists the sources it used so that users can verify for themselves where ChatGPT got its response.
Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT on Nov. 30, the company claimed that the plug-in capabilities were in response to a significant increase in user demand.
On March 23, Mitchell Hashimoto, who founded the software company HashiCorp and was an early user of the ChatGPT plugin API, stated to his 94,300 Twitter followers that it is one of the most “impressive” computer applications he has ever used.
One of ChatGPT’s arguably greatest flaws is that it was trained with data only up to September 2021 and does not have internet access to obtain more recent data. Using plugins that access the internet could address this issue.
OpenAI released ChatGPT-4, the latest version of its artificial intelligence chatbot, earlier this month.
Up until this point, the new version has proactively figured out how to effectively pass large numbers of the hardest U.S. secondary school and law school exams in the 90th percentile.
Cointelegraph recently launched an experiment using the same version of GPT-4 to invest in cryptocurrencies with information from Cointelegraph Markets and a selection of Cointelegraph’s daily news. The purpose of the experiment was to learn how Cointelegraph interprets news to make trading decisions.