OpenAI has launched plugins for ChatGPT, extending the chatbot’s functionality by giving it access to third-party knowledge sources and databases, including the web.
Although the plugins are only available in alpha to ChatGPT users and developers on the waitlist, OpenAI has prioritized a small number of developers and subscribers to its premium ChatGPT Plus plan, with plans to roll out larger-scale and API access.
One of the most interesting plugins is OpenAI’s first-party web-browsing plugin, which allows ChatGPT to retrieve data from around the web to answer various questions. Prior to the release of the plugins, ChatGPT’s knowledge was limited to dates, events, and people before September 2021.
The plugin uses the Bing search API to retrieve content from the web and cites its sources in ChatGPT’s responses.
The web-browsing plugin, however, presents some risks. OpenAI’s research found that an experimental system built in 2021 by the AI startup called WebGPT quoted unreliable sources and cherry-picked data from sites it expected users would find convincing, even if those sources were not objectively the strongest. Meta’s BlenderBot 3.0 had similar access to the web, but quickly began delving into conspiracy theories and offensive content when prompted with certain text.
OpenAI acknowledges that a web-enabled ChatGPT might perform undesirable behaviors, such as sending fraudulent and spam emails, bypassing safety restrictions, and generally increasing the capabilities of bad actors who would defraud, mislead, or abuse others. The company claims to have implemented several safeguards to prevent this, informed by internal and external red teams.
In addition to the web-browsing plugin, OpenAI has released a code interpreter for ChatGPT, providing the chatbot with a working Python interpreter in a sandboxed, firewalled environment along with disk space. It supports uploading files to ChatGPT and downloading the results, making it particularly useful for solving mathematical problems, data analysis and visualization, and file conversion.
OpenAI has also collaborated with companies like Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier to create plugins for ChatGPT. The plugins allow the chatbot to search across restaurants for available bookings, place orders from local stores, and connect with apps like Google Sheets, Trello, and Gmail to trigger productivity tasks.
To encourage the creation of new plugins, OpenAI has open-sourced a retrieval plugin that allows ChatGPT to access snippets of documents from data sources like files, notes, emails, or public documentation by asking questions in natural language.
The sources for this piece include an article in TechCrunch.
