ChatGPT can now browse internet for latest info but there’s a catch

Call it a reckoning of artificial intelligence (AI) and you won’t be wrong. ChatGPT from Microsoft-backed OpenAI took the world by storm with the powerful language AI model that can write snippets of ad copies, blogs, novels, recipes, and even computer codes, among others. No doubt it garnered millions of users in a jiffy and there are way more people using it as of now. However, its dataset was limited up to September 2021 but things are changing as ChatGPT is gaining internet access to answer your queries on current affairs and more.

ChatGPT is gaining internet access

Contrary to what you might have thought, ChatGPT wasn’t connected to the internet. It answers and learns on user queries to provide outputs, however, it had a dataset limited till September 2021. It could not look up the latest information available such as reviews about that new restaurant that opened near you or show timings for the latest movie or you could be asking about the Morocco earthquake or any other current affairs.

Following the latest announcement from OpenAI, GPT4 Premium, and Enterprise users can try their hands on the new ‘ChatGPT’ with internet access via Microsoft Bing. It is no longer limited to September 2021 which opens floodgates for more things than you can imagine.

The developers have confirmed all ChatGPT users will gain internet access soon which includes the free version ‘ChatGPT 3.5’.

But Why Now?

You might be wondering, now why so delayed given the fact that ChatGPT has been around for more than a year now. Turns out there are some ethical and privacy concerns that kept ChatGPT from accessing the web.

ChatGPT can put a mix-and-match of information from the web. The no internet access acted as a safety net to prevent ChatGPT from blurting biased or unreliable information such as political or healthcare related. False information is also a major risk that AIs have undergone before.

The free version of this chatbot gets you all the answers and more while the premium version takes it beyond such as by accessing URLs and large short-term memory. However, every search query costs openAI a few cents and that number adds up to quite a lot given the millions of users as of today. Computing costs are a major concern for chatbots such as ChatGPT which is why shunning it from the internet made more sense as you would need larger server reserves to store the resources translating into higher computing costs.

OpenAI is working on enabling ChatGPT with internet access across all tiers of users. However, the AI sector is still facing the dilemma on ethical, privacy, and other grounds given the fact that AI systems can be misused and for potentially dangerous reasons.