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).
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).