My impression was that the quoted text is only a part of the pre-prompt. I've seen cases where ChatGPT gives a length in the order of thousands of words for the "conversation so far".
Here are a couple (questionable) sources indicating the pre-prompt is much longer:
> I've seen cases where ChatGPT gives a length in the order of thousands of words for the "conversation so far".
ChatGPT is notoriously unreliable at counting and basic arithmetic. So, I don't think the fact it makes such a claim is really evidence it is true.
> Here are a couple (questionable) sources indicating the pre-prompt is much longer:
They haven't shared what inputs they gave to get those outputs. Given ChatGPT's propensity to hallucination, how can we be sure those aren't hallucinated responses?
Here are a couple (questionable) sources indicating the pre-prompt is much longer:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/zuhkvq/comment/j1k...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11ct5zd/chatgpt_re...
Edit: I was struggling a bit with the best jargon to refer to the "pre-prompt"; apparently OpenAI refers to it as the "system message" (contrasted with the "user message") - https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/chat/instructing-cha...