The critical discovery was a way to crack the “Frame Problem”, which roughly comes down to colloquial notions of common sense or intuition. For the first time ever, we have models that know if you jump off a stool, you will (likely!) be standing on the ground afterwards.

In that sense, they absolutely know things that aren’t in their training data. You’re correct about factual knowledge, tho — that’s why they’re not trained to optimize it! A database(/pagerank?) solves that problem already.