According to the post, the updates are now accessible to Plus and Enterprise users who are utilizing the GPT-4 model. Soon, additional users would be able to use the web browsing feature, although OpenAI didn’t say whether this meant GPT-4 would be made available to non-premium users or if browsing would only be supported for the GPT 3.5 model.

Prior to this update, ChatGPT had an ever-growing knowledge base gap. Due to the nature of training AI models like generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), ChatGPT’s knowledge base previously ended in 2021 – most likely the year it was effectively finished for production.

Previous testing revealed both successes and failures in OpenAI’s attempts to integrate browsing with ChatGPT. Reports that beta versions of ChatGPT with browse were being utilized to get around paywalls started to circulate in June 2023. Additionally, it tends to have a propensity for conflating current events with historical information.

ChatGPT’s browsing feature comes quickly following OpenAI’s September 25 announcement that the chatbot was also receiving a multimodal update:

As reported by Cointelegraph, ChatGPT, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, will be able to understand plain language spoken queries and respond in one of five different voices as well as view and interpret images.

OpenAI also recently announced DALL-E 3, the latest version of its image-generation AI.

In light of all these updates, it’ll be interesting to see what the company has left to reveal at its inaugural developer’s conference, OpenAI DevDay, scheduled to take place in San Francisco on November 6.