Extend ChatGPT’s abilities to search documents

ChatGPT Retrieval Plugin is a free handy development tool that allows you to easily search and find supporting documents by asking ChatGPT questions using everyday language. Designed to work with ChatGPT, this plugin has a repository that makes it easy to retrieve different files and data online.

ChatGPT Retrieval Plugin’s usage mainly lies in being able to request inputted information by asking the AI valid questions. Not only does this allow you to test and improve the AI’s abilities, but the plugin also lets enterprises make their internal documents available to their employees through ChatGPT.

What are ChatGPT plugins?

ChatGPT—short for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer”—is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and first launched in November 2022. It has been built on top of various large language models (LLMs) and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. It’s fairly accurate with its initial answers, but as with most AIs, it eventually devolves into nonsense and “hallucinates” incorrect answers.

Despite this, the AI chatbot’s capabilities remain popular and so—with the help of programming languages—plugins were created for it to execute various actions that go beyond simply searching the internet for responses to your questions. One of these is ChatGPT Retrieval Plugin, which uses OpenAI’s embeddings model in order to generate embeddings of document chunks, and then store and query them using a vector database on the backend.

This add-on is an open-source and self-hosted solution so developers can deploy their own version of it and register it with ChatGPT. Aside from retrieving data using queries, it’s mainly capable of providing the AI chatbot with memory, as well as supporting several vector database providers. However, its usage still has some limitations. One of its major issues is that it’s not always effective at capturing exact keyword matches.

Has a lot of potential

All in all, ChatGPT Retrieval Plugin is a great addition to ChatGPT’s functions if you’re looking to expand its usability. Despite its limitations, its open-source code allows you to extend actions that can benefit you and further improve the AI chatbot’s capabilities. This not only makes it pretty handy outside of answering people but it also displays how AI can be applied in different ways.