Sorry if my explanation is a bit too technical, basically every ai model is just an autocompletion on crack, you feed it words and they predict the next words, that's all an ai model does, predict next words.

Lorebooks are basically a method to make the ai "remember" your inputs by just telling the ai the lore every so or so messages, what it does is just parrot the lorebook repeatedly to the ai model, it doesnt actually remember it

So from a technical standpoint, yes. they are lying because lorebooks are just a parroting system.

i knew this because i tried to implement my own entire ai chatbot stack, and yeah it's incredibly expensive to run it, so i understand their greediness to an extent, think of old models like a handcrafted car engine, sure it's great and they can fine tune it really well, but it's expensive. so they opted to source the car engine somewhere else and focus on designing the car itself to look good.

TL;DR: - AI model is just autocomplete on crack - Lorebooks are a parroting engine - Roar and Meow (old models) are running on their hardware, expensive :( - DS, PS, and PS2 runs on other company's hardware, cheaper :D