While I appreciate the distinction you're pointing out, I disagree with your conclusion that the agentic system and its environment will remain separate going forward. There are strong incentives to merge the external environment more closely with the model's environment. I can imagine a future where GPUs have a direct network interface an os-like engine that allows them to interoperate with the external environment more directly.

It seems like a natural line of progress as RL is becoming mainstream for language models; if you can build the verifier into the GPU itself, you can drastically speed up training runs and decrease inference costs.