I remember when the US captured Venezuelan president Maduro, and when I posed a prompt related to this, the model said that’s pure fiction. I told it to double check. Still didn’t want to entertain the idea. It only acquiesced when I specifically directed it to check Reuters. I haven’t noticed this problem in months. Model cutoff seems to be less of a problem these days.
It's a "problem" of compute, I think. If you query without an account on ChatGPT you will see the model look up less stuff and research less, than when you have a paid account and choose "medium" or "high" in the effort slider.
Which makes sense, because of you have looked into search and crawlers you notice that search is actual quite expensive (which is why e.g. Kagi charges a few bucks for search every month).
Came here to say the same thing. Models used to rely heavily on world knowledge from their training data. They are now much better at tool use and deciding when to research a topic, rather than just answering from memory.
I wonder how much that extends to using LLMs for programming. I assume most knowledge of programming language syntax still comes from training data.
After Trump's last inauguration, ChatGPT would still tell me that Biden was President of the US. I understand that the training cutoff was before Biden dropped out. But it knew, or should have known, the current date and that there had been an election since its last update, but it didn't qualify the answer. When I asked it to search the web, it got it right. The moral I took away was to always ask for the search whenever I ask about current events. I do that so routinely that I wouldn't know if this problem has been fixed. I suppose that failing to update my priors per individual model release is a form of bigotry against a widely hated class.
ChatGPT recently started web searching for for basically every general knowledge question, which I found quite odd. Maybe an overcorrection to the issue you were having?
Which makes sense, because of you have looked into search and crawlers you notice that search is actual quite expensive (which is why e.g. Kagi charges a few bucks for search every month).
I wonder how much that extends to using LLMs for programming. I assume most knowledge of programming language syntax still comes from training data.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYCGA2p4bBG68Yufh/thinking-a...
The slop would multiply if we keep feeding it to new models in a loop