But the AI isn’t “recalling” in the same way you do, it doesn’t “remember” what it “read”, it “reads” on demand and has instant access to essentially all of the information available online it was trained on (E: though it’s becoming more or less the same thing, and is definitely the same when it comes to law books for example), from which it collects the necessary details if and when it needs it.
So yes, it is literally “sat” there with all the books open in front of it, and the ability to pinpoint a bit of information in any one of all the books in milliseconds.
Yes, it does, from the information it was trained on (or - stored), which like you say, requires a lot of hardware power so it can be accessed on demand. It isn’t just manifesting the information out of thin air, and it definitely doesn’t “remember” in the same way we do (E: even the best photographic memory isn’t the same as an indexable one).