They can control its diet

Yep, OpenAI know what came out of the rear end and can scrub it on the next training cycle, everyone else eats a little bit of shit.

Apparently it's the opposite. They can improve its output by letting it reason logically or critically on its own output, somewhat like a thought monologue I assume. Not familiar with the details, though.

I'd say don't count on that one. Feeding on others knowledge and then recombining it is also what we do. In comparison to AI we do not appear to be particularly great at any part of this game.

What GPT does as recombining is what it sees from us. AFAIK. Hopefully this AI thing will evolve faster than our compute capacity and we can switch it off in time :) Oh shit. It will read this later... :/

What better way to glue-code disparate things together?