Nope. LLMs don't use the internet for inference at all unless you give it access to a web search api or something like that. chtGPT is just too massive to run on any local machine. But make no mistake, it does not require the internet.
I didn't say "for inference", and neither did the person I replied to.
GPT uses the internet to connect to users, but rather more importantly chatGPT in particular has a layer on top of GPT which is trained from human feedback.
Keywords search "RLHF".
That feedback mechanism is, if anything, becoming more detailed as time passes, so I must infer that it's still considered highly important, probably even for the 3.5 model.
That it does any of this is the specific reason for the story you're commenting on, and why putting data into it isn't like putting the same data into e.g. a Google Docs spreadsheet.
