Access to ChatGPT’s ‘Eyes and Ears’ at last: Plugins finally being rolled out to Plus users.

Back in March, OpenAI started developing “eyes and ears” for ChatGPT in the form of plugins. This would allow ChatGPT to exponentially expand its capabilities as a tool that allows users to basically delegate any task as well. At the time, these plugins were only available to a select few in a “limited alpha” version. But with the announcement of OpenAI on Friday afternoon, over 70 third-party plugins are finally made available to ChatGPT Plus users.

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“We’re rolling out web browsing and plugins to all ChatGPT Plus users over the next week!” OpenAI announced in a tweet. “The transition from alpha to beta allows ChatGPT to access the internet and use over 70+ third-party plugins.”

The plugins should be automatically activated when subscribing to ChatGPT Plus and can be found in a user’s settings under “Beta Features”. The service costs $20 per month and allows users to leverage OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 model, a significantly better but still flawed upgrade over ChatGPT-3. Plus subscribers have access to over 70 3rd party plugins. These can analyze website content, visualize and analyze data, and even help you learn foreign languages.

Users can install as many plugins as they like, but are only allowed to use three at a time. The plugins cover a range of industries and business ventures including shopping, real estate, stocks, travel and groceries. For example, one plugin, ndricks sports, finds and compiles relevant sports news and information.

Plugins like ndricks sports find the news for you so you don’t have to.
Photo credit: OpenAI

The reminder that the 76ers are still in the playoffs is irrelevant information for the Detroit Pistons.
Photo credit: OpenAI

Other plugins like AskYourPDF and ChatWithPDF allow users to provide a URL of a PDF document that ChatGPT can parse. However, these plugins are very picky about which URLs they can and can’t accept, and this plugin doesn’t accept local files from your computer.

Good luck finding PDFs that work with ChatGPT.
Photo credit: OpenAI

ChatGPT plugins are still in beta and it shows. I referenced the ndricks sports plugin earlier and while the information it gave me is correct, the sources it gave me don’t really point to where ChatGPT got this information from. Or in some cases, like “ChatWithPDF”, the plugin just didn’t work when I tried it.

Regardless, the implementation of plugins represents a radical change in ChatGPT’s capabilities, especially in the wake of Google Bard’s massive multimodal update. The ramifications of giving generative AI the ability to access the internet are yet to be fully appreciated, but it’s fair to say that the progression of these machines isn’t at least a little exciting.