OpenAI has allowed its stunning ChatGPT AI to reach out into the world with staggering new powers. It can now access the internet, run its own code to solve problems, accept and work on uploaded files, and write its own interfaces to third-party apps.

Language model AIs teach themselves the arts of communication and problem solving based on a limited set of training data. In the case of GPT-4, that data is quite out of date, with the cutoff being late 2021. That’s where all of ChatGPT’s “knowledge” has come from up to this point, and its only output – at least in the service the public can use – has been text. Now, with today’s launch of a plugin ecosystem, GPT levels up again with some impressive new abilities.

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First of all, it’s now got access to the internet, meaning it can go surf the Web looking for answers if it determines you need up-to-date information that’s not in its knowledge base. To do this it formulates relevant search strings, sends them to Bing, looks at the results, then goes and reads links it deems worthy until it decides it’s got a good answer for you. You can watch exactly what it’s up to while it does this, and when your answer comes back, it’s neatly annotated with links you can click on to go and examine the relevant sources yourself.

Read more: New Atlas