> Respectfully, you’re probably not seeing that question asked and answered because it doesn’t quite make sense as phrased.

I think I see what you are trying to say, but I'm unsure whether you are actually seeing what I am asking.

> The same as your calculator doesn’t do anything until you put in some numbers and operators, an LLM doesn’t do anything unless you give it a prompt and some technical parameters.

This seems to be the crux of the misunderstanding. I thought I explained it, but let me try again.

ChatGPT is based on text input and text output. But you can "train" it to do certain things. Imagine that we train it such that when it says "HTTP GET example.com", then the next input would be the HTTP GET response for example.com. Based on that input, it could issue whatever next output it wants. Which would probably be another HTTP request, which would generate another HTTP output, which would generate another HTTP request, etc.

My point is this seems like it would be a very simple thing to train a GPT model to do. For the engineers who work on GPT, it seems it would be trivial to add this capability. So we can suppose a world where this is possible. (Am I wrong on that? I want to know if this would be non-trivial to add as a capability.)

> There are technical and computational limits that make both your prompt and the token limit fairly small. Several hundreds of words at most

I am very encouraged to hear this, and I want to know more. Why? Why are there limits to the number of tokens? Exactly why? Has anyone ever written a paper about that? Has anyone ever related this concept of "token limits" to the concept of "no harm could be done" in the same way that you are, in response to my question? I don't doubt that they have, but I've been searching and I haven't found it.

> Now, you can give it “access to the internet” as part of responding to your prompt and fulfilling your token limit, and that’s roughly what Microsoft has done with Bing Assistant

This is admittedly a tangent, but do we actually know this to be true? Some theories suggest that "Sydney," or the Bing chatbot, only has access to a search index, and cannot make live HTTP requests.

Continuing the tangent for a moment, this is a big part of why I asked this question originally. If you create example.com/xyzabc, and ask Bing to summarize it, will it make a live HTTP request? Or, if that URL is not in the search index yet, will it know nothing? The implications may be profound, given how Bing Bot / Sydney has expressed its "desire" to hack nuclear launch codes. Could there be a lot riding on whether that system can make live HTTP requests? I'm positing that we can't answer that question right now. Because we don't know what would happen if it could.

Or do we? And if so, do we know through testing, or through theory? I'm admitting ignorance, and saying I haven't read an answer from any source that falls into either category.

> The ramifications really aren’t that big, and we’re probably at least five or ten years of AI research and compute hardware development from making them interestingly bigger

But why? I mean, exactly, why? Is there a theoretical foundation for your claim? Or an experimental one? I'm searching for it.