ChatGPT is now connected to the internet. Is it smarter?

With the last update is ChatGPT is no longer limited to training data before September 2021 and can offer its users the latest information on current events, news and research.

ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users can activate the solution by going to “Profile & Settings (“Profiles & Settings“) go, “Beta features“ (“Beta features“) and under the option GPT-4 “Search with Bing“ (“Browse with Bing“) choose.

The announcement comes just a few months after OpenAI web browsing as part of its ChatGPT Plus-Plan had introduced. However, the company had to withdraw the offer due to concerns about circumventing paywalls.

We’ve learned that ChatGPT’s “Browse” beta can occasionally display content in ways we don’t want, eg if a user specifically asks for a URL’s full text, it may inadvertently fulfill this request. We are disabling Browse while we fix this—want to do right by content owners.

We've learned that ChatGPT's "Browse" beta can occasionally display content in ways we don't want, e.g. if a user specifically asks for a URL's full text, it may inadvertently fulfill this request. We are disabling Browse while we fix this—want to do right by content owners.

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) July 4, 2023

It also comes just a few days after OpenAI multimodal voice and image support for ChatGPT activated.

The good and bad news

The decision of OpenAI, ChatGPT Connecting to the Internet gives users access to the most up-to-date information as soon as they access the solution.

This undoubtedly puts the AI ​​giant in a stronger position. This is how he can compete against his close competitors Google Bard push through. The latter already offers the ability to search the Internet and provide answers in real time as a key differentiator ChatGPT at.

However, web browsing access is made significantly more difficult by its limitation to Plus and Enterprise users.

Considering that a Plus subscription costs 20  USD per month, this pricing seems in contrast to the free availability of Bard and Bing Chat as particularly high.

OpenAI Although it plans to expand web browsing to all users in the future, it has not yet said when this will happen.

What is noteworthy is that the users also have to use the plugin Confirm sharing of your chat history must.

This means that they share their browsing data with you OpenAI have to agree, which raises new concerns about data protection and possible data loss.

On the subject: Who are ChatGPT’s competitors?

Inconsistent performance

Unfortunately, it’s not just availability and privacy that have proven to be issues with the browser plugin.

Since its launch, numerous users have reported difficulties searching the web with ChatGPT.

So wrote Jeremy Howard, co-founder of FastDot AIin a Twitter post: “ChatGPT’s web browsing kept telling me it didn’t know something without even looking! And when it did search, it claimed it found nothing.“

ChatGPT Web Browsing kept telling me it didn’t know stuff, without bothering to search at all! And then when it did search, it claimed to not find anything.@bing tries to be a good Bing here (but makes up something that’s not true), and ChatGPT doesn’t even try to be good 🙁 pic.twitter.com/IsS3RSfOMJ

https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1707219947041239298?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Other users also expressed similar criticisms. This is what one user, Sully Omar, co-founder and CEO of, reported Cognosysthat ChatGPT couldn’t list the top 5 waterproof shoes, “because access to certain websites was restricted“.

https://twitter.com/SullyOmarr/status/1707420145411584122

Although it is difficult to attribute these individual performance problems to a single cause, it is important to know that the search capabilities of ChatGPT are limited.

This limitation arises from the fact that many of the most popular websites have decided to OpenAIs web crawler, GPTBotto block access to their content due to copyright concerns.

Currently have 25% of the top 1,000 websites GPTBot blocked including the most influential publishers such as New York Times, The Guardian, CNN.com, USAToday, Business Insider, Reuters, The Washington Post, NPR, CBS, NBC, Bloomberg, CNBC and ESPN.

At the same time, the connection of ChatGPT to the Internet does not change the tendency that large language models (LLMs) often hallucinate information and produce false facts and figures.

Other topics: Copyright infringement

After ChatGPT is now officially connected to the Internet, significant concerns have arisen about the content that OpenAI read from the Internet.

Questions have arisen as to whether this scraping includes personal information, copyrighted material, or intellectual property of third-party websites.

One of the biggest challenges is that the black box approach of OpenAI When developing AI, consumers and organizations do not have transparency about what data is being used ChatGPT is trained.

This means that there is no way for the general public to see whether protected data categories such as Personal Identifiable Information (PII) or IP have been included in the provider’s training data.

Although websites have the option to opt out of having their data scraped GPTBot To decide, they still have to take action.

However, this is not just a challenge OpenAI regards. Other providers like Google have also taken the approach of giving websites the opportunity to do this Training from Bard and future AI models.

On the subject: AI-based tools that are transforming web scraping

Conclusion

The connection of ChatGPT to the Internet opens up some exciting new possibilities for Plus and Enterprise users. However, there are still many limitations.

The high number of websites that GPTBot Blocking limits the web browsing potential of ChatGPT strong.

This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future as long as concerns about AI models processing copyrighted content and IP continue.

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