I'd like to use OpenAI 4o or Claude Sonnet 3.7 to perform web search for up-to-date generation of text (in my case research on news related to customers). I'm doing this within a Workflow.
In both cases, I start my prompt with the recommended:
You are an expert researcher...{rest of prompt}
OpenAI 4o - Managed
Gives me a very quick response of: Please hold on while I conduct the search for current information on {client_name}. This will just take a moment.
But the workflow doesn't wait around for the rest of the prompt response...
Any suggestions on how I can "make it wait" for the second half of the OpenAI response?
Claude 3.7 - API Key
I have a Teams key configured, and have enabled Web Search (only available March 2025) as ON. But the result back clearly shows data from 2022/2023, and is not up-to-date with expected "news" for a few test clients occurring in early 2025.
So, I'm not completely sure about this but as you're using Retool's out of the box AI blocks, I don't think you'll be able to get the data as you're expecting it.
I found this for openAI which should be able to search the web and then provide you with a response (and a list of urls found) .
With regards to Claude, I think that web Search functionality is valid only for the Claude application, and it is not enabled for messages ran in a retool workflow (as this is basically making an API call and it is most likely using the messages endpoint under the hood
This one is still not solved. Ideally, we would be able to define "tools" in Retool AI, just like you can via Python.
Without this, neither OpenAI 4o / 4.1, nor Grok 3, nor Sonnet 3.7 will actually search the web. Instead, you get a "sorry my knowledge cutoff date is March 2023" or similar.
@Aaron_Patzer we will announce our solution to this specific problem (and many other related problems) on May 28 - thanks in advance for your patience!