The best ChatGPT plug-ins you can use

By Jon Martindale Updated April 12, 2024

AI PDF custom GPT. — Jon Martindale / DigitalTrends

ChatGPT is an amazing tool, and when they were introduced, plug-ins made it even better. But as of March 2024, they’re no longer available as part of ChatGPT, having since been replaced by Custom GPTs, which you can make yourself. Or you can use one of the many amazing options from other developers, AI fans, and prompt engineers.

Interested in learning about how to make the best custom GPT for you? We have a guide for that. If you’re more interested in the best custom GPTs available now, we have a guide for that too.

ChatGPT and other natural language model artificial intelligences (AI) are evolving all the time, with new and exciting features, and ever-more-impressive capabilities. Other companies are right there with OpenAI, too. Microsoft’s Copilot for Windows is improving by leaps and bounds every time it’s updated. And Google’s Gemini isn’t far behind.

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Evergreen writer

Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…

Computing

ChatGPT vs. Perplexity: battle of the AI search engines

Perplexity on Nothing Phone 2a.

The days of Google's undisputed internet search dominance may be coming to an end. The rise of generative AI has ushered in a new means of finding information on the web, with ChatGPT and Perplexity AI leading the way.

Unlike traditional Google searches, these platforms scour the internet for information regarding your query, then synthesize an answer using a conversational tone rather than returning a list of websites where the information can be found. This approach has proven popular with users, even though it's raised some serious concerns with the content creators that these platforms scrape for their data. But which is best for you to actually use? Let's dig into how these two AI tools differ, and which will be the most helpful for your prompts.
Pricing and tiers
Perplexity is available at two price points: free and Pro. The free tier is available to everybody and offers unlimited "Quick" searches, 3 "Pro" searches per day, and access to the standard Perplexity AI model. The Pro plan, which costs $20/month, grants you unlimited Quick searches, 300 Pro searches per day, your choice of AI model (GPT-4o, Claude-3, or LLama 3.1), the ability to upload and analyze unlimited files as well as visualize answers using Playground AI, DALL-E, and SDXL.

Computing

OpenAI spills tea on Musk as Meta seeks block on for-profit dreams

OpenAI has been on a “Shipmas” product launch spree, launching its highly-awaited Sora video generator and onboarding millions of Apple ecosystem members with the Siri-ChatGPT integration. The company has also expanded its subscription portfolio as it races toward a for-profit status, which is reportedly a hot topic of debate internally.

Not everyone is happy with the AI behemoth abandoning its nonprofit roots, including one of its founding fathers and now rival, Elon Musk. The xAI chief filed a lawsuit against OpenAI earlier this year and has also been consistently taking potshots at the company.

Computing

ChatGPT has folders now

ChatGPT Projects

OpenAI is once again re-creating a Claude feature in ChatGPT. The company announced during Friday's "12 Days of OpenAI" event that its chatbot will now offer a folder system called "Projects" to help users organize their chats and data.

“This is really just another organizational tool. I think of these as smart folders,” Thomas Dimson, an OpenAI staff member, said during the live stream.