If you ever tried asking ChatGPT about current events, you know the chatbot could only manage to spit out a limited set of answers, if at all. That’s changing, however.

On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it’s gradually rolling out plugins for ChatGPT, in a move that significantly expands the chatbot’s functionality.

The first wave of plugins, which are now available in alpha to select ChatGPT users and developers, allow ChatGPT to tap new sources of live data including the web as well as third-party sources including Expedia, Kayak and Instacart, among a growing list of other names. Prior to this upgrade, ChatGPT was restricted to drawing information from its training data, which ran until 2021.

«Though not a perfect analogy, plugins can be ‘eyes and ears’ for language models, giving them access to information that is too recent, too personal, or too specific to be included in the training data,» OpenAI said on its website.

For instance, ChatGPT can now pull up answers to questions such as how the box office sales of this year’s Oscar winners compare to other movies released recently. This new functionality is served up thanks to the browser plugin, which shows the sources the generative AI service is drawing information from before it spits out an answer. 

«Plugins are very experimental still but we think there’s something great in this direction,» OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman wrote in a tweet Thursday. «It’s been a heavily requested feature.»

A video posted by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman on Twitter demonstrates to how to use ChatGPT’s Instacart plugin to assist with meal planning. The video shows ChatGPT recommending a chickpea salad recipe and then ultimately adds the required ingredients to Instacart for purchase with just a few prompts.

A video posted on Expedia’s Twitter account shows how to leverage the Expedia plugin to essentially turn ChatGPT into your AI travel agent, empowering it letting it help travelers shop and book flights and hotels, something it previously couldn’t do, although it could identify places and create an itinerary.

«You can install plugins to help with a wide variety of tasks. We are excited to see what developers create!» Altman wrote on Twitter. 

Despite all the buzz around ChatGPT since its debut in November, OpenAI’s own research has shown that a chatbot with access to the internet is a risky prospect. For instance, it can have a tendency to quote unreliable sources or, as OpenAI points out, «increase safety challenges by taking harmful or unintended actions, increasing the capabilities of bad actors who would defraud, mislead, or abuse others.» 

To address those risks, OpenAI said it has implemented safeguards and has limited access to a small group of users and developers to start with. Interested parties can sign up on a waitlist here.