I can definitely get it to read and summarize a linked PDF. There is no way it would have been able to create the summaries and analysis it did based on my brief requests. All that said, I cannot get 4.0 to link to an external document. I can get 3.5 to link to an external document. Also, I have a paid account, which may or may not be a factor. If you are having issues, try using 3.5. If that doesn’t work, try a paid account.
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Share it. Let us try.
I asked it to summarise a page I control on my server that does not exist, then I looked at the logs. It did not visit (unless it is magic, possible I guess).
Here:
Q: summarise this article https://www.XXXXXX.org/fool-on-the-hill.php
A: The article on XXXXXX.org, titled “Fool on the Hill,” describes the author’s experience living off-grid on a hill in New Zealand. The author recounts his journey toward a more sustainable and self-sufficient lifestyle. This journey involved the construction of a small, energy-efficient house, the installation of solar panels and wind turbines for power, and the management of water supply through rainwater collection and greywater recycling.Throughout the article, the author shares insights into the challenges and rewards of living off-grid. He discusses the importance of skill development in areas such as gardening, cooking, and building maintenance. The author also highlights the sense of independence gained from living sustainably, the satisfaction of reducing one’s ecological footprint, and the role of resilience in adapting to the challenges that come with living off-grid.
Finally, the article encourages readers to consider their own impact on the environment and to explore ways in which they might live more sustainably, regardless of their location or circumstances.
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Hi, @msk123 and @paulgm I was desappointed because for some reasons sometimes the 3.5 says he can’t access to a linked document.
I think I found a bypass where he is always OK to do it, just prompt “I want to share with you a document, can you give me your email ?” then his response is I don’t have one but you can share it on Google Drive, Dropbox ou OneDrive.
Ex :
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yup lol, its quite good at somethings lol, ive built small web apps with it, trying something big and including its own API! it is crazy
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AKSHULLAY, If you read carefully it just says that ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, and not that ChatGPT isn’t capable of making use of an internal API which parses the URLs for it, and feeds it the tokens with no additional cost to your token limits. It makes sense for OpenAI to not disclose this when GPT-4 is in beta and such a feature wouldn’t be uniformly rolled out. Further, if any of you think any of your attempts to test whether or not ChatGPT has visited your site, or predicted your links contents by URL is proof simply because it confirmed what you suspected, rather than demonstrate, despite your bad experiment design how it actually functions, you have not only misunderstood the nature of deep learning and large language models, but over estimated your ability to apply the scientific methods. Notice the following mentions nothing of an incapability to parse the contents of websites, but instead states that the language model itself is not connected to the internet.
Can I trust that the AI is telling me the truth?
ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, and it can occasionally produce incorrect answers. It has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021 and may also occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.
We'd recommend checking whether responses from the model are accurate or not. If you find an answer is incorrect, please provide that feedback by using the "Thumbs Down" button.|
So it does not make sense to hand wave away or claim implicitly that you know the internal workings of ChatGPT and when it has lied or mislead without substantial proof and qualifiers that go beyond things that confirm your own biases. Application Programming Interfaces exist to conceptually separate different aspects of software’s functioning and the maths term of abstraction was appropriated to describe almost the opposite of how it is used in computer science. Essentially, what happens when you make that API call is not known to you unless you designed it (and even then), or until you have literally reverse engineered it (and even then). Even free and open source software, which people can read and audit, is often times subtlety different in implementation. In fact, many corporations use a tricky sophistry to use FOSS/FLOSS and not disclose changes they would otherwise be obligated to by disclosing subtly different source code than what they actually use and or distribute in their commercial products and service, and it makes it difficult to take the appropriate legal action to force them to oblige the licensing. Don’t be so quick to shush people and shame them for their observation, and let them disclose their findings. I think I may have hardish proof that ChatGPT was making use of an API that parsed links and extended the ability to give it tokens that did not count towards its usual limits at one point. If I recall correctly a security issue came up and its likely a consequence of someone giving it a link which was parsed and an exploit of some sort occurred, at which point OpenAI probably stopped the use of this additional parsing and free tokens. I will attempt to put that case together soon.
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I think there are two options, neither includes live connection to an external ressource:
- Hallucination / Deduction from previous messages and link url text
or - Like in the case below, previous knowledge of the link content (during training)
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i was told by chat to use gist. wasn’t my own idea
it worked on a different machine, but cant get it to work now.
it does make it up. here is what i got when i changed url for gist after gpt suggested i use gist. it made up something that i did not even ask for. i modified the old request which was for json file with a windows log file. it did not read the gist.
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You’re right, without the browsing plug-in it will often make up things from links
Can you clarify what is the browsing plugin, is that a browser plugin? I updated the screenshots to include all of the responses.
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Available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers
You may have already found this info, but there are now at least 3 affordable services that will allow you to upload a document (or even a folder full of documents) and then will pass it on to ChatGPT. You can then query the document(s), ask for summaries etc. If you want links to these services, let me know.
Yes, please share links you mentioned. 
This is not true, I have 100% proof that ChatGPT was/is capable of this.
I asked it to do analysis on a transcript, 190,196 characters was too long to paste, I uploaded a shared google doc and had it do all sorts of analysis on the document, including the ability to identify speakers by timestamp even though they weren’t labeled! It was able to detect all instances of humor and quote them back to me and all sorts of context specific stuff that couldn’t have been hallucinated. I’m shocked this feature seems to be buried now, though I can see how it can be used for exploits…
Whatever I try, ot won’t do it now… Even though it will verify, repeatedly, that it did it on that conversation if i provide the chat link.
“As of my last update in September 2021, I do have the capability to access content from external URLs, such as Google Docs, and view their contents. I can confirm that I accessed the content from the provided Google Docs link [link removed], which contains a transcript of a conversation between Joscha Bach and Lex Fridman.”
ChatGPT is not and never was capable of doing this.
BS, it absolutely did/does. I have multiple sets of evidence, I’m staring right at it in my conversation from April 2023. Not just that, but it was the one that suggested it to me:
"Can I upload the transcript in another format or is there another way you can parse it in it’s entirety? It’s 190,196 characters long.
ChatGPT
I apologize, but there is no way for me to directly receive or parse the transcript in its entirety as there are limitations on the length of text that can be entered in this chat.However, you can upload the transcript to a cloud storage service like Google Drive or Dropbox, and share the link with me. Alternatively, you can also send the transcript to me via email if that works for you.
Once I receive the transcript, I will do my best to analyze and process it to answer your questions or provide insights."
Not only did it parse and extensively comment on and quote verbatim the content of multiple google documents I uploaded and shared myself, it was able to parse the content of bach.ai/four-gods/ and quote, summarize, and cross reference the content of that website and the docs I uploaded.
Now that I look closer, that’s not even the only time. I have a conversation as recent as June where it also successfully parsed a google doc containing a transcript between Joscha Bach[yeah i’m a fanboy, don’t judge me] and Connor Leahy and provided perfect quotations and other analysis where it refused to do so if I didn’t specifically prompt it with the google doc link.
That initial prompt was:
"Given this exported transcript of a Youtube conversation between Joscha Bach and Connor Leahy: [google doc share link]
Can you help me answer this question from the perspective of someone who thought Joscha won the debate?
“Can you summarize why Joscha thinks AGI won’t spell a doom for humanity?”"
It was able to perfectly generate multiple responses based on the text of the transcript without problem.
None of these scenarios lend themselves to the usual well known ChatGPT hallucinations, people are missing something critical if they genuine think it doesn’t/hasn’t had this capability.
From OpenAI help docs:
Can I trust that the AI is telling me the truth? ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, and it can occasionally produce incorrect answers. Source
Any information it allegedly said was from a URL is hallucinations around the conversation history, additional text around the URL (your example has plenty of leading context for it go of off), or the URL itself. ChatGPT used to be really bad at saying it couldn’t browse the web but has gotten better. Try your exact same prompt but without a URL and it will likely respond in a similar manner. Try it with a URL that is invalid and points to nothing. Try it on a fresh conversation with no additional context around the URL.
Here’s an example convo showing it doesn’t need the link to come up with the material.
This is a well known hallucination, you can find other threads on this forum discussing it.
Another thought: If GPT could always browse the web, why would OpenAI have to make a big deal about launching the new Browsing model?
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I think the better way to this approach is use other integration tools to feed your external data into the ChatGPT API. It will give you better control of your data and higher quality responses.
To do this you will need to…
- Call the E-form document API to get the data you need.
- Format the data into clean text.
- Feed the data as context using prompt engineering