ChatGPT can now browse the web. That's right, the popular chatbot is no longer bound by knowledge until September 2021, as before. If it is on the Internet, there is a good chance that ChatGPT knows about it.

Didn't ChatGPT already do this? Yes. In May, users could start using ChatGPT on Bing, and the functionality was extended to mobile app users. However, OpenAI quickly withdrew this after users discovered they could use chatbots to access paid content.

By September 27, this problem was resolved by having chatbots identify themselves to the websites they visit and check if they have permission to scrape certain pages for information.

Thus, Browse with Bing was rolled out to paying users in beta mode. During the past few weeks of testing, this time everything seemed to go smoothly, and Browse is now out of beta mode and a standard part of the GPT-4 model accessible to paid Pus and Enterprise ChatGPT users.

If you are using the free version, you should also have access to the latest browsing features in the near future.

Microsoft, creator of the Bing search engine, was an early investor in OpenAI and has reportedly invested more than $13 billion in this artificial intelligence company to date The partnership between the two tech companies has now lasted more than three years.

While the latest version of browsing won't revolutionize your ChatGPT experience, the lifting of the chatbot knowledge limit in September 2021 will add some fresh air to your interaction. Tasks that require access to the latest information, such as technical research or vacation planning, are the kinds of things that will benefit most from such an upgrade.

Using Browse in Bing is also easy. While it had to be toggled on in the ChatGPT settings in Beta, Plus and Enterprise users no longer need to do so after the full release; it is available as a drop-down menu option in the GPT-4 model selector.

Other recent ChatGPT updates include DALL-E3 for Plus and Enterprise users along with voice and image conversation capabilities.

Considering Google Bard, Bing Chat, and ChatGPT, there is little separating the three AI chatbots.

Bard's biggest selling point was up-to-date information directly from Google search; ChatGPT has now joined Bing Chat, which has access to real-time Bing search data, narrowing its lead.

All three bots also provide users with a list of references citing where the information they got came from - a useful feature since chatbots still sometimes get answers to your questions wrong.

Bird, Bing, and ChatGPT are not worried about being left behind for now, but it is those working in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry who may begin to feel the heat. For years, companies have spent big bucks to get their websites to appear at the top of search engine results.

With access to the entire Internet, AI chatbots now comfortably provide answers to user questions in a single conversation. It may begin to feel a bit tedious to type in a search query, sift through the list of links provided by the search engine, and hope that the answer you are actually looking for is there.