OpenAI opens web access to ChatGPT Plus users

One of the main criticisms that ChatGPT has received since its very launch is that the chatbot does not have an Internet connection to obtain recent information. As the service itself remembers every time we access it, in its list of limitations, “Limited knowledge of world and events after 2021”, that is, that your knowledge of everything that happened after 2021 is limited. OpenAI regularly updates the knowledge base of its chatbot, so we see improvements in this regard, but even so, it is at a clear disadvantage against Bing and, according to what Google told us at Google I/O 2023, against Bard. .

Until now, the only way to make ChatGPT capable of exploring recent information was to providing it at the prompts, either directly, or through one of the many plugins for the browser that have appeared during the last few months. It is true that manually providing the links ensures that it will use the information we want, but of course, for this we will first have to search for them. Thus, this can be useful if we want the chatbot to create some text in relation to said information, but it is totally useless if what we were looking for was only said information.

Thus, users of the service have been demanding that OpenAI correct this limitation for months, especially since the appearance of rival services that have shown that this integration can be carried out without compromising the quality of the responses provided by the model. And beyond the fact that the users of ChatGPT themselves were the ones who were interested in this functionality, the chatbots market itself forced OpenAI to take a step in this directionso it was only a matter of time.

The wait is over, although only for some (at least for now) since, according to what we can read in the update log from the official chatbot blog, OpenAI has started rolling out the web browsing feature in ChatGPT Plusthe payment method of the chatbot that, for a monthly fee of 20 dollars, provides access to some advanced functions of the service, as well as priority access to it when the service is saturated.

The web browsing function is beginning to be deployed in the beta phase, so it is necessary to access the ChatGPT Plus configuration and, in it, the beta functions, in order to activate it. And users who access this section will find another very interesting novelty, and that is that ChatGPT plugins have moved from alpha to beta, and you can request access to them through that same section. According to the post, the rollout has already started, and it will be completed for all premium accounts within the next week.