OpenAI brings ChatGPT to the Internet

Image credits: Open AI

OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, can now surf the web – in some cases.

OpenAI today Launched ChatGPT plug-ins, which extend the functionality of the bot by giving it access to third-party knowledge sources and databases, including the web. Available in alpha for ChatGPT users and developers Waiting listOpenAI says it will initially prioritize a small number of developers and subscribers of its premium ChatGPT Plus plan before rolling out widespread access and the API.

Hands down the most interesting plugin is OpenAI’s first-party web browsing plugin, which allows ChatGPT to pull data from around the web to answer various questions put to it. (Previously, ChatGPT knowledge was limited to dates, events, and people prior to about September 2021.) The plugin retrieves content from the web using the Bing search API and displays any websites it visited in crafting an answer, citing its sources in ChatGPT responses.

A chatbot with web access is a risky prospect, OpenAI’s own research has found. An experimental system created in 2021 by an AI startup, called WebGPT, sometimes quoted from unreliable sources and motivated to pick data from sites that it expected users would find compelling – even if those sources were not objectively the strongest. The since resolved BlenderBot 3.0 Meta was able to hit the web as well and quickly She started behaving in a socially unacceptable mannerDelve into conspiracy theories and offensive content when prompted for a specific text.

Image credits: Open AI

The live web is less structured than the static training dataset and – by implication – less filtered, of course. Search engines like Google and Bing use their own security mechanisms to reduce the chances of untrusted content rising to the top of results, but those results can be manipulated. Nor does it necessarily represent the entirety of the web. As a piece in the New Yorker notes, Google’s algorithm prioritizes websites that use modern web technologies like encryption, mobile support, and Coding scheme. Many websites with quality content are lost as a result.

This gives search engines a great deal of power over data that may inform the answers of web-related language models. It has been discovered that Google prioritizes its own services in search by, for example, reply A travel query that contains data from Google Places rather than a richer social source like TripAdvisor. At the same time, the computational approach to research opens the door to bad actors. In 2020, Pinterest leveraged Google’s image search algorithm to show more of its content in Google Image searches, according to the New Yorker.

OpenAI acknowledges that web-enabled ChatGPT may perform all kinds of unwanted behavior, such as sending fraudulent emails and spam, bypassing security restrictions, and generally “amplifying the capabilities of bad actors that would defraud, mislead, or abuse others.” to them.” But the company also says it has “implemented several precautions” reported by internal and external red teams to prevent this. Time will tell if it is enough.

In addition to the web plug-in, OpenAI has released a ChatGPT code interpreter which provides the chatbot with a Python interpreter running in Firewalled environment with disk space. He supports upload files to ChatGPT and download results; OpenAI says it’s particularly useful for solving mathematical problems, performing data analysis and visualization, and converting files between formats.

Image credits: Open AI

A group of early collaborators have built ChatGPT plug-ins to join OpenAI, including Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier.

They are pretty much self-explanatory. The OpenTable plugin allows the chatbot to search across restaurants for available reservations, for example, while the Instacart plugin allows ChatGPT to place orders from local stores. By far Zapier is the most extensible, and it connects to apps like Google Sheets, Trello, and Gmail to power a host of productivity tasks.

To enhance the creation of new plugins, OpenAI has created an open source “recovery” plugin that enables ChatGPT to access snippets from Documents from data sources such as files, notes, emails, or public documentation by asking questions in natural language.

“We are developing plugins and bringing them to a wider audience,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “We have a lot to learn, and with everyone’s help, we hope to build something useful and safe.”

Plugins are an odd addition to ChatGPT’s development timeline. Once restricted to the information in its training data, ChatGPT, with its plugins, is suddenly more capable – and perhaps at lower legal risk. Some experts accuse OpenAI of profiting from the unlicensed work that ChatGPT is trained on; The ChatGPT dataset contains a variety of public websites. But plugins could potentially address this problem by allowing companies to retain full control of their data.