ChatGPT is full of sensitive private information and spits out verbatim text from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, fandom wikis, Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, Wikipedia pages, news blogs, random internet comments, and much more.
There is a memory, a storage, that would not be called a database, which encodes interaction “weights” of neurons. Those parameters where modified during training process and in some sense the information is somehow encoded there. But it is not possible to decode the whole book word to word. It is very similar to our memory in this sense. Do you remember any book word to word? The whole book?
You understand that the neural network is not the entire picture, right? Like, yes you’re correct in general about how these models are trained, but ChatGPT does not operate in a vacuum. For instance, when it was connected to the internet that was just for information searching - the neural network in use was frozen, it wasn’t actively training on internet content.
It’s a language system, it can operate as a search tool, it has to have access to a source of information in order to generate responses to queries. That source of information isn’t contained in the model itself, but it is connected to it and it’s part of the whole ChatGPT system.
ChatGPT4 now indeed can connect to internet and read the sites and summarize the data. But this has nothing to do with storing it he whole books in their memory. It read the internet sites exactly the same way as you and me do. I do not understand what is your argument here. Internet is external to ChatGPT.