WebGPT: OpenAI teaches GPT-3 to browse the web

In one sentence OpenAI publishes WebGPT, a GPT-3 fine-tune that learns to use a text browser to search the web for answers with source citations, trained via imitation learning + RLHF.

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OpenAI does something new: it takes GPT-3 and teaches it to use a browser. Not a graphical one, a text-mode version: click a link, scroll, search Google, copy a passage into citations.

The model, called WebGPT, is trained by watching humans do the same thing, and then rewarded when answers are good (RLHF).

It's the first serious prototype of an assistant that searches before answering, with source citations. The pattern is everywhere today: Bing Chat, Perplexity, ChatGPT with browsing, Gemini grounding, Claude with web search. All descend from here.