OpenAI just keeps making ChatGPT better.

In a blog post on Tuesday, the AI firm rolled out a handful of new features and pricing updates for certain versions of its flagship ChatGPT chat bot. Notably, GPT-4 (the most advanced version you can get right now) got some fancy new tools that will let it interact better with third-party plugins, while other ChatGPT functions got reduced prices.

The big thing is "function calling," a new feature added to GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-turbo. Basically, you describe a programming function to the bot and it intuitively makes code to make that function happen. Ask it what the weather is like in Boston, and it'll go through a whole process (outlined in detail in OpenAI's blog post) to spit an answer back at you.

You can also just Google what the weather is like in Boston, or anywhere, really.

Aside from that, GPT-3.5-turbo got an expanded "context window," which means it can reference a greater amount of previous text from the conversation in order to better generate answers without forgetting things. This new version of 3.5-turbo costs twice as much as the vanilla version, but the good news is the vanilla version is getting a 25 percent price cut.

This is all pretty technical in-the-weeds stuff, but at the end of the day, it makes ChatGPT better for those who need it.