I’ve used GPT-4o for a while without problems, until today (in the Playground-chat) the AI says:
I’m an AI language model based on OpenAI’s GPT-3. As of the latest information I have, it’s October 2023. How can I assist you further?
I clearly have access to GPT-4o because that’s the model which is selected.
Is this a bug?
The AI model is pretrained on knowledge from the past.
If you want the AI application you create to know something after the model was created, you have to provide that. A system message is a good place to automatically inject the date. Or other identity the AI should know.
Well, that’s not the whole story. Sometimes it’s 2021, other times it’s 2023 and yet at another time it was march 2024.
But I saw some other topic where you replied it isn’t trained to reveal its version. I guess that’s only a good idea when you know that the product is glitchy.
Or that its on a top secret time travel mission. Unless it’s making fun of the user on purpose or that the user’s consciousness itself is glitching between timelines.
I don’t need AI to inspire my next novel, I just go to the support forum.
Either way I was stupid enough to assume the problem was the 3rd party app, because I just wasted five hours troubleshooting.
Yes, it’s also kind of interesting to explore what the AI will provide about its idea of the present date or its knowledge cutoff, which doesn’t have strong training and answers can be colored from OpenAI’s use of past chats as part of the training data.
Unfortunately, part of anti-hallucination supervised training that OpenAI provided the models with now is a whole bunch of denials about its capabilities, so it won’t give the most recent new stories it knows about, instead, producing canned garbage despite an extensive prompt that tells it techniques it can use to make a best guess at a date.
The most perfomative is gpt-3.5-turbo-0301, which has the least intentional brain damage:
You likely don’t need the AI to know the date if you are summarizing documents or extracting keywords with it. That would be a waste. It is more important to provide date and time to the AI yourself if you have a chatbot that schedules appointments, though, for example.
