technology

From the article:

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.

And then there's this:

Secondly, it can now run the code it writes. OpenAI has given it a working Python interpreter, sitting in a "sandboxed, firewalled execution environment," along with some disk space, which stays available for the duration of your chat session, or until it times out. It can also now upload and download files.

So if you ask it a question that requires some serious number crunching, it's now capable of coding up a piece of software specifically for the task, and running that code to complete your task. You can supply it with data in certain file formats, and it'll perform operations on that data and give you something back again, potentially in a different format if that's what you ask for.

Edit: Forgot the icing on the cake

These plugins are gradually becoming available to paid users and developers through a waitlist. And new plugins are going to proliferate at extraordinary speed, since nobody even needs to code them. "You write an OpenAPI manifest for your API, use human language descriptions for everything, and that's it," tweeted developer Mitchell Hashimoto. "You let the model figure out how to auth, chain calls, process data in between, format it for viewing, etc. There's absolutely zero glue code."