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 But as of March 2024, they’re no longer available as part of ChatGPT, having since been replaced by Custom GPTs, which you can make yourself.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.

Topics

Evergreen writer

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

Computing

This massive upgrade to ChatGPT is coming in January — and it’s not GPT-5

ChatGPT on a laptop

OpenAI is set to launch a new AI agent in January, code-named Operator, that will enable ChatGPT to take action on the user's behalf. You may never have to book your own flights ever again.

The company's leadership made the announcement during a staff meeting Wednesday, reports Bloomberg. The company plans to roll out the new feature as a research preview through the company’s developer API.

Computing

Is AI already plateauing? New reporting suggests GPT-5 may be in trouble

A person sits in front of a laptop. On the laptop screen is the home page for OpenAI's ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot.

OpenAI's next-generation Orion model of ChatGPT, which is both rumored and denied to be arriving by the end of the year, may not be all it's been hyped to be once it arrives, according to a new report from The Information.

Citing anonymous OpenAI employees, the report claims the Orion model has shown a "far smaller" improvement over its GPT-4 predecessor than GPT-4 showed over GPT-3. Those sources also note that Orion "isn’t reliably better than its predecessor [GPT-4] in handling certain tasks," specifically coding applications, though the new model is notably stronger at general language capabilities, such as summarizing documents or generating emails.

Computing

ChatGPT monthly usage may now rival Google Chrome

A person sits in front of a laptop. On the laptop screen is the home page for OpenAI's ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot.

A number of popular generative AI platforms are seeing consistent growth as users are figuring out how they want to use the tools -- and ChatGPT is at the top of the list with the most visits, at 3.7 billion worldwide. So many people are visiting the AI chatbot, and its figures are rivaling browser market share. It can only be compared to Google Chrome figures in terms of monthly users, which is estimated to be around 3.45 billion.

Statistics from Similarweb indicate that ChatGPT saw a 17.2% month-over-month (MoM) growth and a 115.9% year-over-year (YoY) traffic growth. Some highlights that spurned the ChatGPT growth during 2024 include its parent company, OpenAI, updating its web address from a subdomain, chat.openai.com, to a main domain, chatgpt.com. The tool especially saw a surge of traffic in May 2024, when it hit a 2.2-billion-visit milestone, and has been growing ever since, according to Similarweb researcher David F. Carr.