The AI field was kind of dull, and the buzz it created mostly happened within its own field, and rarely reach far beyond its own audience.

But when Openai introduced Chatgpt as an AI chatbot tool, the internet was quickly captivated. This is because the AI is able to do a wide range of tasks, including writing poetry, technical papers, novels, and essays.

And when others, like Microsoft, started embedding the technology into Bing and Edge, Google started to worry.

And when OpenAI starts monetizing ChatGPT with ChatGPT Plus, Google was certain that it had to move fast.

Then, when Google announced Bard, the AI should be superior to ChatGPT, because it was allowed to learn from the internet, whereas ChatGPT's knowledge was limited to things that are up to 2021.

What this means, ChatGPT's knowledge about the world is restricted to that year or older events, which made it unable to relate to more recent events, like the 2022 soccer World Cup or the 2023 earthquake in Turkey.

But this time, OpenAI is unleashing the dragon, by finally allowing ChatGPT to browse the web on its own.

Before, without access to the free internet, ChatGPT was stuck in a knowledge that is two years old.

This time, OpenAI announced support for third-party plugins, which mean that developers can enhance the AI on their products.

"These plugins enable ChatGPT to interact with APIs defined by developers, enhancing ChatGPT's capabilities and allowing it to perform a wide range of actions," OpenAI said.in the plugins feature introduction.

According to OpenAI, plugins are among the most-requested ChatGPT features, as they can unlock many additional features not available with the chatbot natively.

Initially, the plugins should only be available to a handful of developers and ChatGPT Plus users before being rolled out more widely.

For starters, many API users have already developed plugins for ChatGPT, including Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier.

The most notable plugins come from OpenAI itself, and include a web browser and a code interpreter.

Initially, they are still a work in progress, but they show a lot of promise.

For example, the web browsing plugin can leverage Bing Search API and allow ChatGPT to scour the web for current information.

This, should help ChatGPT scrape even the most-current information whenever it's needed.

While this upgrade should be considered one of the biggest updates OpenAI is giving to its phenomenal AI, the update also runs the risk of corrupting it with misinformation and offensive content.

By allowing ChatGPT to digest more recent information, the AI is essentially allowed to learn new things on its own, which could corrupt its mind, just like how people corrupted Microsoft Tay, for example.

OpenAI has anticipated this, and said that it has worked diligently to reduce "certain classes of safety risks."

For example, to decrease the chances of ChatGPT pulling offensive and incorrect data from the web, the AI shall rely on Microsoft's database for verifying source reliability and truthfulness of information. Then, OpenAI also released the update with a baked-in 'Safe-mode' to prevent the retrieval of problematic content.

And lastly, OpenAI only allows plugins to operate as an isolated service, meaning that browsing data should not be able to corrupt ChatGPT's main knowledge base.

OpenAI said that it has also implemented "several safeguards" to prevent ChatGPT's web surfing ability from becoming a problem.

In a blog post, the company stated that the plugins are “tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle [...] ."

The news comes a days after the company launched its next-generation large language model, GPT-4, which is a lot more powerful that GPT 3.5, due to its arrays of improvements, including multimodal capabilities that allow it to accept both image and text inputs, and generate text outputs, among others.

After initially introducing it in alpha, OpenAI released the tool to beta in May to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers, saying that the beta release allows ChatGPT to "access the internet and to use 70+ third-party plugins."

The note said that ChatGPT Plus users would “enjoy early access to experimental new features, which may change during development. We’ll be making these features accessible via a new beta panel in your settings, which is rolling out to all Plus users over the course of the next week.”