Does the OpenAI API Provide Internet Access for Web Browsing?

API
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1

Hello OpenAI community,

I’m exploring the capabilities of the OpenAI API and I’m curious to know if it provides access to the internet for web browsing purposes. Specifically, I’m interested in whether the API allows for fetching information from the web.

Could someone shed some light on this? Any information or documentation regarding the internet access capabilities of the OpenAI API would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

2

No. The API does not have this capability. You’ll need to build your own web browsing infrastructure.

3

No. some tools are made available in the assistant API, browsing is not (maybe one day it will be)
have a look at https://browse.new/

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4

Forgive me for mentioning a competitor, but Perplexity.ai does have what they call an ‘online’ model which is aware of up-to-date news somehow. I think it’s ‘pre-indexed’ from a WebCrawl (like what Google does) and not live-lookups however.

Anyway for using OpenAI, and ‘true’ web search maybe you could use the AI to generate specific keywords, and ask it to “construct” good text for a google search and then execute the google search on what it sends back?

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5

What you are describing is functions.

You can offer the AI a function specification for an internet search engine. Give the function the parameters that your chosen engine can employ besides the query itself, such as a date range or recent_days, or result count requested.

tools = [{
 "type": "function",
 "function": {
  "name": "internet_search",
  "description": (
   "Duckduckgo internet search API, returns top results to query\n"
   "- Use search when information newer than pretraining is needed"
  ),
  "parameters": {
   "type": "object",
   "properties": {
    "query": {"type": "string",
              "description": "long natural language allowed"},
    "recent_days": {"type": "number",
                    "description": "how many days back from today"},
   },
  },
 },
}]

Ask the AI about something like recent OpenAI announcements, and the AI will emit a function call for you to handle:

{
 "id": "call_FkebOrc3a3nn352fajfoa3",
 "function": {
  "arguments": "{\n  \"query\": \"OpenAI blog announcements March 2024\",\n  \"recent_days\": 30\n}",
  "name": "internet_search"
 },
 "type": "function"
}

(here, the AI told about it’s knowledge cutoff and today’s date is able to make wise decisions)

It is then up to you to handle and fulfill that search request, likely with a paid API call to another search service.

Further browsing of web pages is problematic, because of dynamic javascript-powered content that is nearly universal.

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