ChatGPT maker disables feature that enabled AI chatbot users to surf the internet via Bing – India Today
By Ankita Chakravarti: Earlier this month, OpenAI added a new feature to their AI chatbot app called ChatGPT. This feature allowed users to search the internet using Bing and get answers to their questions. However, OpenAI recently announced that they are temporarily disabling this feature because there is a problem that needs to be fixed.
The feature, known as “ChatGPT Browse with Bing,” was only available to subscribers of ChatGPT Plus, which is a special version of the chatbot that you have to pay for. This feature was helpful because it allowed ChatGPT to find the most up-to-date information on the internet, even if it wasn’t part of its original training. For example, it could find information about current events happening in the world. It did this by using Bing’s search engine to look for the information.
“ChatGPT Browse with Bing is a beta feature (available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers) that allows ChatGPT to search the internet to help answer questions that benefit from recent information,” the company said in an update.
OpenAI realized that sometimes the ChatGPT Browse feature showed information in a way that they didn’t want it to. For example, if a user asked for the full text of a website link, the chatbot might show the whole text when it wasn’t supposed to. To make sure this doesn’t happen, OpenAI decided to turn off the feature on July 3, 2023. They want to fix the problem and make sure they respect the rights of the people who own the content on the internet. OpenAI is working hard to bring back the feature as soon as possible and they appreciate the understanding of the users.
“As of July 3, 2023, we’ve disabled the Browse with Bing beta feature out of an abundance of caution while we fix this in order to do right by content owners. We are working to bring the beta back as quickly as possible, and appreciate your understanding!” the company added.
The Browsing with Bing feature is important because it helps ChatGPT get information that is more recent and accurate. Without this feature, ChatGPT’s knowledge is limited to what it learned up until 2021. So, if you ask ChatGPT a question about something that happened after 2021, like who won the 2022 FIFA World Cup, it won’t be able to give you the right answer.
It’s interesting to note that some users found a way to get around paywalls by using ChatGPT’s Bing integration. This means they could access content that would normally require payment without having to pay for it. OpenAI didn’t want this to happen, so they decided to disable the feature temporarily while they work on fixing the problem.
