This seems to be exactly what ChatGPT is good at: present static knowledge from a given text corpus in a linguistically fluent manner.
The full ChatGPT does that for "the internet" as it was on training time (2021). One of its disadvantages/challenges for information retrieval tasks is that its knowledge cannot be updated easily (perhaps soon to be more or less resolved), and that it's unclear how it has gathered the specific knowledge it is presenting.
Regarding the updating part, it still needs an automated way to discover new sources which leads back to internet crawling and hence one of the most costly parts of current search engines.
A language model by definition encodes knowledge about a language...
If you mean "it doesn't also have knowledge of the wolrd, facts etc", well, it has been trained with a huge corpus of all kinds of material, so it does.
If you mean "it doesn't understand it, so it's not real knowledge", then that's getting into philosophy/semantics, and it could be argue that it does, or that what humans do is not very different...
The full ChatGPT does that for "the internet" as it was on training time (2021). One of its disadvantages/challenges for information retrieval tasks is that its knowledge cannot be updated easily (perhaps soon to be more or less resolved), and that it's unclear how it has gathered the specific knowledge it is presenting.
Regarding the updating part, it still needs an automated way to discover new sources which leads back to internet crawling and hence one of the most costly parts of current search engines.