According to Cointelegraph, artificial intelligence (AI) firm OpenAI has announced that its ChatGPT can now browse the web and integrate up-to-date information into its responses. The update is available immediately for Plus and Enterprise users using the GPT-4 model. The web browsing feature will be available for other users soon, but OpenAI did not specify whether that meant GPT-4 would be enabled for non-premium users or if browsing would be implemented for the GPT 3.5 model.

Before this update, ChatGPT's knowledge base was limited to data before September 2021. Due to the nature of how AI models such as generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) are trained, ChatGPT's knowledge base previously ended in 2021. In previous testing, OpenAI reported successes and setbacks in its attempts to implement browsing with ChatGPT. In June 2023, reports began to surface that beta versions of ChatGPT with browse were being used to bypass paywalls. It also appeared to have a penchant for hallucinating and sometimes conflating recent and historical information.

The browsing feature update follows OpenAI's September 25 announcement that the chatbot was also receiving a multimodal update. 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. With the slew of updates sweeping across the company's products, it will be interesting to see what it has left to reveal at its first-ever developer's conference, OpenAI DevDay, slated to take place on November 6 in San Francisco.