In late 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. Want a paragraph on why coffee is good for you? Want to find an opinion on whether a hot dog is a sandwich? Want a conversation between the Avengers on how to tie a tie? Want to learn how to write code for a website? Want planning for your next trip to Belize? Want a Shakespearean sonnet on why Shahrukh Khan is beloved by many?
ChatGPT could help you, as a large language model that generates responses, as if a human were writing them, and is trained on a whole lot of internet data, be it books, articles, websites or conversations. But, it did have limitations. One of those limitations was that it was not up to date and was stuck till mid-2021. It was trained only on data up to September 2021.
So, if you asked ChatGPT about RRR, it wouldn’t know what that was. You’d get a polite but slightly annoying “I’m sorry, but I cannot provide real-time information” to questions like that. Because its information was not up to date. No longer, though. Or at least for those willing to pay a price.
In September 2023, it was announced by OpenAI that ChatGPT would be equipped with real-time internet access and the capability to provide direct source links. This feature would be exclusively available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise subscribers. There have, also, been updates, like ChatGPT asking websites for permission before it looks at their stuff.
This way, it could be respectful to those websites and prevent exploitation, like someone breaching a paywall. The other update is that websites could tell ChatGPT how to behave when it visits, giving them more control.
And for users who don’t subscribe to ChatGPT Plus or Enterprise, but yearn for internet access, OpenAI is said to have assured that this capability would eventually expand to all users.
