[dartos]

It’s all statistics. In the training set, there were probably questions asking about its capabilities and it was trained to say it has less than it does. (Or it’s a bad system prompt)

There’s no internal understanding of itself or its capabilities.

[gtirloni]

There is no understanding to answer a question about its capabilities but the point is it has the capability but the prompt is failing to trigger it. This is separate from "knowing" or not. Think ChatGPT functions that don't work.

[dartos]

Knowing how these models are trained and how these chat systems are built, I wouldn’t expect the question

“Can you search the internet?”

To actually cause an internet search.

Generally you know information about yourself, and that quirk of humans is likely reflected in the QA training data and thus the model’s outputs.