Very interesting framing. The 'plugins' are not the 'eyes and ears' of the language model but actually the mind!
The Expedia plugin for example uses a scheduling algorithm + a database of flight information to find the right flight for the user. This plugin is what is doing the actual 'reasoning'...
@shiwali @emilymbender and I reckon neuro-symbolic remains a banned term in the presence of anything GPT :p