can you imagine the self restraint it would take to do all openia and other language models on air-gapped computers NOT connected to the open internet?

Totally feasible. You can buy fancy GPU's machines and just not host them at the azure data center. But then we'd never all be able to open a browser window and just interact with GPT. You'd have to physical go into some room and type from a terminal but it would be "safe".

and then you'll ask well come on we could put a robot in the room and have it type for us and a video camera so we could see the screen and... pretty soon you have an way for the AI to "get out"!