I don't think it is connected to the internet. It's not "doing" anything. Just simulating how it might do that task. At the end of the day, all it is doing is keep predicting the next set of characters, given the prompt (that includes the personality)

Just so happens to be so good at predicting the next character set.

This is untrue. ChatGPT was able to regurgitate the contents of websites that were created after its training set .

It's public info that they retrain the model partially periodically