OpenAI has announced it has upgraded its popular large language model–based chatbot, ChatGPT, now integrated with up-to-date information into its responses and ability to browse the web.

According to a Sept. 27 post on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT can now browse the internet “to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to source.”

According to the announcement, Plus and Enterprise users who are using the GPT-4 model can access the updates immediately. However, it is not clear whether the new feature will be implemented for the GPT 3.5 model, which is the one available to non-premium users. The post also mentioned that the new feature will be available to other users “soon,” but did not provide any specific timeline for this.

Prior to the update, ChatGPT had a limited knowledge base that didn't extend beyond the year 2021. This gap in knowledge was due to the way artificial intelligence models such as Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) are trained and developed. It is presumed that 2021 was the year when ChatGPT was essentially finalized for production, and therefore, its knowledge base was limited to that year.

OpenAI had previously stated that it had encountered both successes and setbacks in its efforts to implement browsing functionality with ChatGPT. By June 2023, it had been reported that beta versions of ChatGPT with the browsing feature were being used to bypass paywalls. However, it has also been noticed that the AI system has a tendency to hallucinate and sometimes confuse current and past information.

ChatGPT’s browsing feature update follows OpenAI’s Sept. 25 announcement that the chatbot was also receiving a multimodal update, including the ability to see, hear, and speak, with Plus users having access to voice conversations with the chatbot “over the next two weeks.”

In September, OpenAI unveiled the Dall-E 3, the latest version of its text-to-image tool.

ChatGPT website experienced a drop in user traffic worldwide for the third consecutive month in August, according to data from website analytics company Similarweb.

During that month, the amount of traffic to OpenAI’s chatbot, both on desktop and mobile devices, decreased by 3.2% to 1.43 billion worldwide. This decline comes after a 10% decrease in traffic two months prior. Additionally, the average time spent on the site also decreased slightly from 8.7 minutes to 7 minutes in August.