ChatGPT Plus users were set to gain access to more than 70 third-party plugins, expanding the assistant beyond answering from its built-in language model. The rollout also included web browsing, giving ChatGPT a way to search the internet for current topics and events.
How users can enable plugins
OpenAI introduced the plugins in late March and began rolling them out to all ChatGPT Plus accounts. Plus access costs $20 per month, and the plugins were expected to be available to all Plus users by the end of the week described in the announcement.
After an account is approved, users can turn on the options in ChatGPT settings under “Beta Features.” There are separate controls for plugins and web browsing, so either can be enabled independently.
Users then select plugins through the Model Selector and choose individual tools from the Plugin Store. OpenAI says ChatGPT handles plugin use automatically once the features are active: it can decide when to search the internet or use an enabled plugin in response to a request.
Tools for searches, shopping, and documents
The plugin collection spans shopping and search services for clothing, real estate, travel, food, and car rentals. Other tools focus on specific tasks, including bringing PDF content into a chat for discussion, generating prompts, and searching for one-word domains.
This setup makes choosing tools part of preparing for a task. A user planning a trip, for example, might want travel-related tools; someone discussing a document could choose a PDF-focused plugin. The options can extend what ChatGPT can do, but they do not all run together in every conversation.
Each chat session is limited to three active plugins. With more than 70 options available, users need to select the tools that best fit the conversation they want to have.
ChatGPT moves toward a tool-based platform
Plugins position ChatGPT as an interface connecting a language model with external tools. The article describes possible capabilities such as extracting and explaining material from web pages, improving code, and analyzing and visualizing data.
The rollout came amid moves by other technology companies to build chatbot platforms. Google had announced an international rollout of Bard and its first plugin partners, while Microsoft had signaled platform ambitions for Bing Chat. OpenAI's plugin system is another step in that competition.
Developers interested in building plugins could sign up for a waiting list, and development documentation was available. That gives developers a route to participate in the ecosystem while users access tools through ChatGPT.
What a chatbot-centered web could mean
Adding tools could make language models more capable than systems that only generate responses. OpenAI had also studied the potential impact of language models on the job market, with the article noting that access to tools could increase their effects.
The broader possibility is that people might increasingly use chatbots to find information and complete tasks that currently take them to websites. If that shift grows, chatbot providers could capture more user attention, while publishers, social media platforms, and online stores face uncertain consequences.
OpenAI and Microsoft had said they wanted content creators to share in the success of chatbots, but how that sharing would work remained unresolved. Questions also remained about copyright when chatbots use content without explicit permission, including during the training of the models themselves.