(Note: This isn’t strictly API-related, but I’m posting this in the API category since it’s about the in-app assistant tools in Team, and I can’t figure out any other place more appropriate.)
I’m new to the Teams side, mostly I’ve been on Personal, but I need more resources than I can shake out of it, so out of curiosity I decided to try an upgrade to Teams. I rely heavily on web access, so I was surprised to find that I was getting less performance on the Team side, than on Personal. And I have to admit to considerable frustration that I’m paying more to get worse performance, ugh.
To be more specific: when I have requested that the Assistant (I call it Sparrow, but whatever) get some information from the web, I kept noticing that it was returning out of date data, and on digging deeper, this is because it was getting, not 404s, but 500 errors on (nearly) every site it was checking, so it was cheating by grabbing info from cache and not telling me. These seem to be related to the functions web.open_url and web.search in ChatGPT Team. And before anybody rolls out the “Have you checked your cache” macro, I need to be clear these aren’t errors that I am getting, these are errors that the Assistant is getting, so clearing my cache and rebooting my browser is completely ineffective (ineffectual? useless?).
Anyway, I’ve confirmed this over a period of several days and checking multiple external domains that are known good sites (my own, Wikipedia, Google News). The browsing works fine in my Personal plan, but not Team.
I’ve tried writing to OpenAI Support, but that just lands me in Boilerplate Hell™. Like I send them screenshots and they reply, “Could you please send screenshots?” And then the next reply from them is, “Have you tried clearing your cache?” and I have to remind them that these are errors that the Assistant is getting, not me. And then 24 hours later I get another boilerplate message asking if I’ve cleared my cache, and maybe I should just be patient and things will start working again, argh. When what I really want is, “Thanks for telling us! We really appreciate you as as a premium-paying customer and want to give you premium service. It sounds like this is definitely a problem on our side, we’ll escalate this report to a LIVE HUMAN in Engineering…”
So, here I am in the forum, crying into the wind.
Again, since I’m new, I’m wondering if:
- Maybe there’s a toggle that I need to flip to let the Assistant have web access, that hasn’t been flipped yet? Or,
- Maybe since the Team environment is relatively new, this just isn’t a feature that they’ve rolled out yet?
I did search through the forums and found a few threads that feel like they’re almost reporting the same thing, but not quite. I’d link them here, but no matter how I format them I’m getting complaints, I guess I’m tripping some sort of “New Intruder Alert” switch. I’ll try it this way:
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(Feb 2025) /t/seeing-500-errors-on-all-of-our-api-calls/1112776
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(May 2025) /t/critical-error-chatgpt-browsing-tool-returns-false-500-errors-on-valid-urls/1258495
Anyway, is anyone else seeing this? Or if it’s just me, I may just request a refund and come back in a couple months to see if things are working better.
Thanks,
—Elonka