I’ve noticed when writing little bedtime stories that require specific research (my kids like Pokemon stories and they’ve been having an episodic “pokemon adventure” with them as the protagonists) ChatGPT has done a fantastic job of first researching the moves the pokemon have, then writing the actual story. The only mistake it consistently makes is when I summarize and move from a full context session, it thinks that Gyarados has to swim and is incapable of flying.
It definitely seems like it does all the searching first, with a separate model, loads that in, then does the actual writing.