ChatGPT's web browser was too good, so its creators blocked it

It's a rare day when a software developer blocks a feature for being too good, but that's exactly what's happened to OpenAI's ChatGPT AI chatbot –its abilities to browse the web with Bing were simply too effective at dodging paywalls. Recall that in March, OpenAI added support for the Bing browser to ChatGPT, specifically to give it knowledge of current events. Until then (and right now) the AI algorithm had only been trained up through the fall of 2021. If you asked it for the result of a recent sporting event, for example, ChatGPT would plead ignorance. When Bing support was added, ChatGPT could then ferret out those answers, providing answers that were either current or just a day or so old. But OpenAI discovered that Bing was too good at its job -- it was circumventing paywalls to provide the answers that users asked for.