ChatGPT can now access the live Internet. Can the API?

API
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Given the news announcement I am wondering if the API now has that same access to the Internet.

Thanks in advance!

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Yes, you also can write a function that the AI can call with an internet search query, and then fulfill it by an external API to get search results. Then another function for getting web pages, even ignoring robot files meant for OpenAI and not ā€œmeantā€ for you.

Just as you can write a function to let the AI multiply two numbers reliably.

See the Bing API price per query: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing

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Thank you. I know I can leverage external services. I am specifically asking if I can put the request directly into an API prompt given the press release. Meaning we would not have to use an external service.

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There is no such feature. You get the AI language back from the AI.

Plugins and browsing functions are implemented in ā€œChatGPT the APPā€ the same way as they would need to implemented in your ā€œHotBot with AskJeevesā€. (You canā€™t beat OpenAI at their own game, after all.)

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5

The announcement was made on X, yesterday at 1PM.

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The answer has already been given, why are you ignoring it?

NO.

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7

Pretty sure theyā€™ll add it to the API eventually.

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Might be waiting a while.

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Why on earth would they do that?

Internet Access will never come to the API because there is zero reason for it toā€”developers can( (and should) simply implement their own browsing feature.

Developers shouldnā€™t want browsing via API anyway, primarily because of the loss of control.

  1. It can quickly and dramatically increase generated tokens as the model essentially self-prompts after every function return.
  2. The browsing feature is locked to OpenAIā€™s network so, among other things,
    • Browsing can be limited by sites using robots.txt to prohibit access by the OpenAI bot
    • Browsing will be limited to sites approved by OpenAI
    • Your users will be region-locked to OpenAIā€™s region

I suppose I could see the desire for it from a low-barrier-to-entry perspective, but I think everyone is ultimately better off rolling their own.

I donā€™t have the time to look right now, but I wouldnā€™t be at all surprised if there wasnā€™t already an active GitHub repo to solve this very issue.

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@anon22939549 not sure why you think thereā€™s zero reasonā€¦the amount of topics/people asking for it shows the opposite is true.

I agree that in some specific cases someone might want to have more control, but if you see how efficient ā€œsearch with Bingā€ is youā€™ll realise that actually reproducing it will be very hard.

I tried a lot of alternatives, from integrating bing and google to Tavily (thanks to another userā€™s help), and none of them is nearly as good as ā€œsearch with Bingā€.

At the start I thought as well someone must have done itā€¦but in reality, an ā€˜intelligentā€™ integration of internet search into OpenAI (or other LLM), beside simply integrating an API that calls a search and returns a result), itā€™s nowhere to be found.

Tavily seems a good attempt, but ā€œSearch with Bingā€ itā€™s vastly superior.

I donā€™t understand why they donā€™t let everyone integrate it via API using their own Azure Bing key.

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11

Found anything on this? I am having serious trouble getting it to work setting it up myself

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Also interested! Surprised Search with Bing is not available via API.

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Perhaps Iā€™ll add a little color on getting live results from the web and the technical challenges around it:

  • there are URLs that are not publicly available (not to mention those that serve different content based on who is viewing)
  • there are URLs that has robot.txt that basically says ā€œdo not visit these page if you are not humanā€
  • aside from permission and accessibility issues, what human sees is quite different from quite the bots read and depending on use cases, some userā€™s use cases wants the DOM tag and some doesnā€™t

That said, it is definitely possible for someone to build the functions for some of the more popular use cases for sure.

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Personally, Iā€™d love the feature. Sometimes Iā€™m just looking for a quick simple web search feature in an agent prompt. Iā€™ve already built several AI agents that leverage Google custom search API. Itā€™s a lot to wrangle and doesnā€™t always work as well as ChatGPTā€˜s search function. It could help me keep dev cost down for my client if I didnā€™t have to handle and maintain the integration. Itā€™d be nice if as their features improve the API web search feature would automatically update. Not to mention one more account to manage for my client paying for Google search API usage and the corresponding security concerns.

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It should be done, because we have no visibility on how CHATGPT browses and processes data. Plus you can not feed chatgpt a full search or page, as it complains about length.

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