Aka Ekene, PBA Journalism MenteeOpenAI has recently unveiled new plugins for its AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, which enable the bot to browse the internet selectively, accessing third-party knowledge sources and databases.
The plugins are currently in alpha testing and will initially be rolled out to a small number of developers and subscribers to the premium ChatGPT Plus plan before becoming available to a broader audience.
One of the most noteworthy plugins is OpenAI’s first-party web-browsing plugin, which allows ChatGPT to retrieve data from the internet to respond to questions posed to it, drawing from the Bing search API and citing its sources in its responses.
However, this ability also poses a risk, as past experimental systems with web access, such as Meta’s BlenderBot 3.0 and OpenAI’s WebGPT, have been found to quote unreliable sources or delve into conspiracy theories and offensive content.
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The live web is less filtered than a static training dataset, and search engines’ algorithms have significant power over the information that web-connected language models like ChatGPT can access. OpenAI has implemented safeguards to prevent ChatGPT from performing undesirable behaviors, but time will tell if these measures are effective.
In addition to the web plugin, OpenAI has released a code interpreter for ChatGPT that provides the chatbot with a sandboxed, firewalled environment for solving mathematical problems, data analysis, visualization, and file conversion. OpenAI has also collaborated with several companies to develop plugins for ChatGPT, including Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Shopify, and Zapier.
To encourage the creation of new plugins, it has open-sourced a “retrieval” plugin that enables ChatGPT to access snippets of documents from data sources like files, notes, emails, or public documentation by asking questions in natural language. While some experts have criticized OpenAI for potentially profiting from unlicensed work used to train ChatGPT, the use of plugins may address this issue by allowing companies to retain control over their data
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