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Is ChatGPT a standalone LLM or an LLM-based agent?

Determine whether OpenAI’s ChatGPT, specifically the ChatGPT 4o mini model, is a standalone Large Language Model or an LLM-based agent within the sense of a software system that integrates a language model with orchestrating components for planning, memory, profiling, action execution, and security.

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Background

The paper analyzes various LLM-based agents using the proposed LLM-Agent-UMF and examines proprietary systems like ChatGPT to understand their internal architecture. Due to ChatGPT’s closed-source nature, the authors evaluate observable behavior (e.g., refusal of harmful prompts) and propose hypotheses for possible guardrail and execution pipelines.

Despite these observations, the authors explicitly state that they cannot definitively determine whether ChatGPT (in particular, ChatGPT 4o mini) is merely a standalone LLM or a more complex agent architecture, leaving this as an unresolved question.

References

As a prominent language modeling solution, ChatGPT's inner workings warrant thorough examination to better understand its capabilities and limitations. However, being a proprietary and closed-source system limits our ability to assertively analyze its structure and capabilities. Although it exhibits characteristics that align with a simple LLM, we cannot definitively conclude whether it is indeed a standalone LLM or an LLM-based agent.

— LLM-Agent-UMF: LLM-based Agent Unified Modeling Framework for Seamless Integration of Multi Active/Passive Core-Agents (2409.11393 - Hassouna et al., 17 Sep 2024) in Section 4.2