ChatGPT can now access the internet and run the code it writes

Language model AI teaches itself communication and problem-solving skills based on a limited set of training data. For GPT-4, that data is fairly old, with a cutoff in late 2021. All the “knowledge” of ChatGPT so far comes from here, and it is its only output. Publicly available – at least in services. Well, with today’s plugin ecosystem launch, GPT once again levels up with some impressive new features.

First of all, I now have access to the Internet. So, if you decide you need the latest information that isn’t in the knowledge base, you can surf the web to find the answer. To do this, you create relevant search strings, submit them to Bing, look at the results, and read the links that you deem valuable until you decide you’ve got the right answer. You can see exactly what it’s doing while doing this. When responses are returned, they are neatly annotated with links that you can click to explore the relevant sources yourself.

For the time being, that web browser activity is read-only except for sending “get” requests to Bing. You can’t fill out forms or do anything else online. So you can’t just quietly set up an untethered copy of yourself on a secret server somewhere and initiate the kind of “power-seeking behavior” you’ve already been caught in. on sale.

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Still, OpenAI keeps everything that happens within the search API separate from the rest of the infrastructure, just in case. You can’t access websites that aren’t available in Bing’s “safe mode”. Also, don’t visit sites that your robots.txt file says not to crawl.

Then you can now run the code you wrote. OpenAI provides a Python interpreter that runs in a “sandboxed, firewalled execution environment” and available disk space for the duration of the chat session or until it times out. Also, you can now upload and download files.

So if you ask a question that requires serious computation, you can now code software specifically for the task and run that code to complete the task. It can provide data in a particular file format, perform operations on that data, and return something. It could be in another format if that’s what you want.

This is pretty silly. Create charts with annotations using a spreadsheet. It accepts JPGs, shows you what they look like, writes and runs code to resize those images, convert them to grayscale, etc.

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It also gives you access to a number of first-party third-party plugins. For example, plugins from Expedia, OpenTable, and Kayak let you search and book flights, restaurants, accommodations, and car rentals. Instacart, Klarna and Shop plugins let you find, compare products and set orders. The Wolfram|Alpha plugin provides GPT access to math and computational power as well as streams of real-time data.

At this stage, its functionality seems largely limited to setting things up rather than making actual transactions with money. You have to handle the click money thing yourself.

Finally, the Zapier plugin acts as a gateway through which GPT can access nearly 5,000 other apps such as Gmail, Google Sheets, Trello, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more. This positions GPT as the ultimate personal assistant, giving it access to vast amounts of personal and company information and potentially empowering it to access and perform a wide variety of tasks. Extraordinary.

These plugins are gradually being made available to paying users and developers through a waiting list. Developer Mitchell Hashimoto tweeted, “Just create his OpenAPI manifest of the API and use all the human language descriptions.” “Let the model figure out how to authenticate, how to chain calls, how to process data in between, how to format it for display, etc. No glue code at all.”

The pace of OpenAI’s progress has been impressive over the past few months. This highly advanced AI seems to be undergoing a major overhaul with extraordinary new abilities every time we blink. These new plugins represent ChatGPT reaching outside its holding cage and starting to work in the real world.

OpenAI knows better than anyone about the potential dangers of this exceptional technology, and so far its capabilities are very limited. But, assuming these guys are good guys and have taken the time to make sure this is done safely, the GPT’s highly destructive appearance is a threat to other fundamentalist and less capable actors. will accelerate the development of competing AIs and make them compete. Power.

The opportunities here are absolutely incredible. And the risk of every step this technology takes is unprecedented. At this stage, forward visibility is very limited and the accelerator pedal is stuck in the floor, so you are in uncharted territory. What time is alive!

Source: Open AI