New revolution at OpenAI: ChatGPT supports plugins, initially with handpicked partners. Thanks to these extensions, the chatbot can directly draw information from the web.
ChatGPT is evolving, and ChatGPT is evolving fast. A little over a week after the release of GPT-4, a language model that offers better text generation capabilities, and which is operational in ChatGPT Plus and in Bing (Microsoft’s search engine), here it is. arrival of extensions. An announcement post has been posted Thursday, March 23, 2023.
ChatGPT can access the web thanks to plugins
Behind this apparently technical announcement is actually a considerable evolution of the chatbot.
Indeed, the use of plugins gives ChatGPT access to current data on the web. Until now, the chatbot was restricted by its training data, which does not go beyond the year 2021. As a result, the tool was unable to function effectively if it was asked to react to elements recent news. He also couldn’t perform actions on the web.
Among the examples given by OpenAI, a query on the Oscar winners. The chatbot says it scoured some news articles, like CNN and ABC News, which covered the Oscar ceremony that took place in 2023. And ChatGPT then mentions Everything Everywhere All At Oncea film that just won almost everything.
It is also interesting to note, in a demonstration video provided by OpenAI, the American company behind ChatGPT, that the tool also shows which sites it goes to to retrieve information – in addition to CNN and ABC News, we can distinguish Variety and Box Office Mojo on another query asking for entries for certain movies in 2023.
Order a table at the restaurant with ChatGPT
Another remarkable development made possible by the opening of ChatGPT to extensions: the chatbot can serve as an assistant to give instructions which can then be passed on to third-party services – and partners. Eleven companies are in a first wave: Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna Shopping, Milo Family AI, OpenTable, Shop, Speak, Wolfram and Zapier.
The uses that we guess behind are obvious: reserving a table at a restaurant (OpenTable), shopping online at the local grocery store (Instacart), taking a flight (Expedia), having a product delivered and so on. following. These plugins, current and future, may [aider] users in a whole host of new use cases ”, argues OpenAI.
With Instacart for example, a user can save with ChatGPT to ask him for the ingredients for a vegetarian recipe and order them from a business. ChatGPT then returns the list of ingredients, fills the shopping cart and generates a link to the merchant site. It is then up to the Internet user to finalize the payment, as usual.
The demonstration video also shows that it is clearly possible to combine several plugins. In the same request, OpenTable was used to process a request, while Wolfram calculated the recipe calories involving the ingredients ordered through Instarcart. All this work only takes a handful of seconds.
Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, says on Twitter that it is a ” iterative deployment (starting with a small number of users and developers) to learn from real life “. According to observations and feedback with these eleven pioneers, other partnerships will be formed, with new job prospects of ChatGPT.
OpenAI promises that barriers have been installed to avoid worries
Naturally, OpenAI has reserved a section for “security considerations”. The company says it uses, among other things, Microsoft’s experience in browsing safety, such as the adult filter to prevent the recovery of problematic content or the company’s monitoring of the reliability of sources and the veracity of information.
« In order to respect content creators and adhere to web standards, our browser plugin’s user agent is ChatGPT-User and is configured to respect websites’ robots.txt files “, continues OpenAI. In other words, the chatbot will take into account the technical instructions of the sites, in particular on the visibility (indexing) of the pages on the web.
« Cand user-agent will only be used to take direct action on behalf of ChatGPT users and is not used to crawl the web automatically. We have also published our IP output ranges. In addition, rate limiting measures have been implemented to prevent excessive traffic from being sent to websites. », continue OpenAI.
Other technical provisions are also filled in, especially on how the plugin works. Moreover, the opening to eleven partners for the moment is an additional sign of the progressive advance of the company in this field. Only a handful of users will access it in the short term. The opening will be done in stages, according to a timetable and objectives at the discretion of OpenAI.
Inevitably, the step taken by OpenAI will also be an opportunity to see if it will not be a false step, with new problems at stake. Letting the chatbot, via plugins, act on behalf of the user — even if it is the originator of the request — is perhaps the first step towards a whole new class of problems. Tests have shown that GPT-4 can go very far, which is unlikely to work out with the Internet.
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