The world of artificial intelligence (AI) is ever-transforming, and the name that pops up at the top of the list is that of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. With its latest update, users can now surf the web through ChatGPT on mobile, but only through Bing. In its latest announcement, OpenAI revealed that users of ChatGPT Plus, the company’s AI-powered chatbot’s premium edition, may use a new function called Browsing to instruct ChatGPT to look up information on Bing.
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To activate browsing, the users can select GPT-4 in the model switcher and then select browsing from the new features section. One can select the option “Browse with Bing” from the drop-down list. Now, browsing is available on both the iOS and Android ChatGPT apps.
As per OpenAI, browsing comes in handy when one wants to inquire about current affairs or such a topic that extends beyond the bot’s original training data. If the user disables browsing, ChatGPT’s knowledge is available until 2021.
ChatGPT becomes a more useful helper with browsing, which Microsoft and OpenAI have previously stated would be available this year, first on the web. Before it, questions like which film won the Best picture at the Academy Awards 2023 would not produce any reliable or constructive responses.
But limiting ChatGPT’s search options to Bing seems to fuel hostility on the user’s side. However, it is noted that OpenAI has a close relationship with Microsoft, which has invested over $10 billion in the startup. The commercial incentives seem clear here. Nevertheless, Bing is far from the end-all and be-all of search engines.
An investigation conducted in 2011 revealed that Bing may have been unjustly favouring Microsoft results over Google links. More recently, Stanford research provided evidence that an “alarming” quantity of misinformation was present in Bing’s top search results.
Without a doubt, Microsoft keeps working to enhance the algorithms behind Bing. However, the drawback of ChatGPT’s new browsing feature is that users won’t have any other options when Bing inevitably makes mistakes. A less contentious update to the ChatGPT app is that tapping a search result will now transport you directly to that section of the chat. According to OpenAI, this modification will be implemented this week along with Browsing.
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ChatGPT’s browsing feature is quite helpful when one tries to summarise long research papers or has a question related to any particular paper. What’s more, one can provide the exact link to the research paper while posing the query. However, it should be noted that the bot can generate errors if it is unable to access the content directly. This generally arises when a website has a scanned copy of the content or contains an embedded link to the PDF. If the content is directly available on the website, it can easily be accessed and provide the response that you are seeking.
