ChatGPT on the phone can now browse the internet. But only via Bing.
OpenAI announced that subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, the premium version of the company’s AI-powered chatbot, can use a new feature on the app called "Browsing" to have ChatGPT search Bing for answers.
Browsing can be enabled by heading to the New Features section in the settings, selecting “GPT-4” in the model switcher, and choosing “Browse with Bing” from the drop-down list.
Browsing is available on both the iOS and Android ChatGPT apps.
OpenAI says that "Browsing" is particularly useful for queries relating to current events and other information that extends beyond the app's original training data.
Browsing — which Microsoft and OpenAI previously announced would arrive sometime this year, first on the web — certainly makes ChatGPT a more useful assistant, particularly for research.
Before it, asking ChatGPT questions like “Who won the 2023 March Madness women’s tournament?” wouldn’t yield anything particularly useful or correct.
However, limiting ChatGPT’s search capabilities to Bing seems just short of a user-hostile move. The business motivations are obvious — OpenAI has a close partnership with Microsoft, which has invested over $10 billion in the startup — but Bing is far from the be-all and end-all of search engines.
In 2011, an analysis found that Bing was potentially unfairly serving more Microsoft-related results than Google links.
More recently, a Stanford study showed evidence that Bing’s top search results contained an “alarming” amount of disinformation.
Microsoft undoubtedly continues to improve Bing’s algorithms on the back end. But the problem with ChatGPT’s new Browsing feature is, when Bing inevitably slips up, users won’t have any alternatives to choose from.
It has been recently discovered that ChatGPT’s app search result now takes you directly to the respective point in the conversation. That change — along with Browsing — is rolling out this week, OpenAI says.
Follow the latest news on Google News
