[popinman322]

You can already coax ChatGPT into interacting with external systems today; I set up a prompt where the model pretended to be a factory system on a communication bus. It could access its "inventory" by posting a prefixed message to the communication bus.

After a bit of prompt engineering the model could query inventory, "manufacture" various recipes, and store the end products in inventory.

It might be possible to look at the weight activations as it reasons through contacting the external system over the emulated communication bus? For a suitably varied set of commands you might be able to find a subset of weights that are most correlated to the task and prune the others. Then you'd be left with a model that can retrieve and store information, as well as perform reasoning tasks.

Still has problems with working memory (the input token limit, since the model is auto-regressive) given all the external information is coming back in via the prompt, but ChatGPT seems to handle that gracefully right now.