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Well, technically, GPT "itself" really isn't a search engine. The LLM was trained with capabilities to communicate to the runtime that I can request additional information for fulfilling the request, such as performing a web request - which is performed by the runtime and the results were fed back into the LLM as a regular prompt. Thus GPT only answers based on the textual context - again: involving statistical likeliehood.

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Right, and I think that in this case the person making the original statement was probably erroneously using "ChatGPT" to mean "LLM" (in the same way that "Kleenex" is used to mean a disposable tissue).

It's true that ChatGPT-the-product can search the web (using a traditional search engine as a RAG datastore), and it's also true that o4-the-llm is not a go-out-and-find-external-truth search engine. I'm more sympathetic to the original point because many people do misunderstand what LLMs are and what they're capable of, and it's worth dispelling those myths (though it's valuable to do it precisely specifically to avoid this sort of confusion).

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