ChatGPT’s Internet Connectivity

• ChatGPT is not designed to be directly connected to the open internet. It operates in a controlled environment on Anthropic’s private servers.
• Allowing unfettered internet access would provide more potential information sources, but also greater risks like exposure to toxic content or scraping copyrighted data.
• Currently, ChatGPT’s knowledge comes from the datasets it was trained on by Anthropic prior to release. These contain broad information on many topics sourced from books, online sources, and other content.
• Anthropic carefully filters and processes the training data to align with ChatGPT’s goals of providing helpful, harmless, and honest information.
• There are tradeoffs between having a massive internet knowledge base and controlling the quality and security of information and training.
• In the future, Anthropic may explore expanding ChatGPT’s approved knowledge sources in a thoughtful, phased approach. But open internet access has major risks.
• Users can provide factual updates to improve ChatGPT’s knowledge within the confines of its current model capabilities and training paradigm.

The lack of open internet access has advantages and disadvantages. Anthropic is taking a measured approach focused on security, quality, and beneficial outcomes over unfettered knowledge aggregation. But ChatGPT’s skills continue to rapidly improve within its controlled environment as the AI technology evolves.