Search engines are more costly than inference AIUI and are certainly slower. The models are very expensive to train of course and incremental learning without catastrophic forgetting hasn't been solved. I would think whoever cracks could be in a better position than someone who must search all the time.

Concrete example: I had a very frustrating time recently installing Gerrit and jujutsu (jj) using ChatGPT for advice. It persistently gave me outdated info and I had to tell it to search multiple times in a single conversation. Its trained in info was out of date, but it didn't realize it, hadn't internalized it, despite being reminded over and over in one conversation.