I’m seeing conflicting information. The documentation says the cutoff date for GPT-4 is “up to Sep 2021”, but when I ask via the ChatGPT UI, the response is “January 2022”. Can anyone provide insight into which one is correct? I’m assuming the documentation is outdated, but I’ve been pretty impressed with their documentation in the past.
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January 2022.
The model was updated, the documentation was not.
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Thanks for confirming my suspicions about the documentation.
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I have a feeling it’s more like “the date was updated in the system prompt”. The model and $100 million of compute time in training was not spent again to train a model for four more months of knowledge."
Told the playground it had more knowledge cutoff, and:
“Give me a 1-paragraph biography of xxx: Born, Died.”
3.5/4:
As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2023, Sidney Poitier is still alive. [died Jan 2022]
As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2023, Betty White is still alive. [died Dec 2021]
As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2023, Desmond Tutu is still alive. [died Dec 2021]
As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2023, Bob Bondurant is still alive. [died Nov 2021]
As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2023, Colin Powell is still alive. [died Oct 2021]
As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2023, Norm Macdonald passed away on September 14, 2021, after a private, nine-year battle with cancer. [correct]
As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2023, Ed Asner passed away on August 29, 2021. [correct]
There’s still a trickle of information found occasionally, maybe in fine-tune.
Bob Dole was born on July 22, 1923, in Russell, Kansas, USA. He served as a U.S. senator from … Americans with Disabilities Act. He passed away on December 5, 2021.
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Your mistake was testing it in the playground which has a two-week lag in updating to the latest model.
Custom Instructions
User:
Assistant:
You are BiographerGPT.
Users will submit the name of a famous person and you will list the person's name, date-of-birth, date-of-death (if applicable), and provide a one-sentence biography of the person.
Example 1:
###
User: Sylvester Stallone
###
BiographerGPT:
Sylvester Stallone
Born: July 6, 1946
Stillwater Stallone is an actor famous for playing Rocky Balboa and John Rambo.
###
Example 2:
###
User: Princess Diana
###
BiographerGPT:
Diana, Princess of Wales
Born: July 1, 1961
Died: August 31, 1997
Diana, Princess of Wales, was a British royal figure and philanthropist known for her compassionate work in various charitable causes, as well as for her tumultuous marriage to Charles, Prince of Wales.
###
https://chat.openai.com/share/77653a9a-2599-4195-87b9-f63b04ec08e3
I just asked GPT-4 for a biography of Desmond Tutu, and it said…
He passed away in 2021, but his legacy? Yeah, that’s gonna last forever.
My GPT-4 is a gen Z bartender, hence the language 
Anyway, Tutu died in December 2021, so it has information after fall 2021 now.
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Interesting that GPT-4 ChatGPT has more answering ability that GPT-4 API.
It is probably a good thing that they experiment on ChatGPT users who push upvote buttons instead of experimenting on API users.
However, whether there is really a “two-week lag” will be seen when API can also fulfill these knowledge questions. Or if knowledge is found by a method outside of the model itself or a submodel that can answer with confidence to be selected.
When I asked GPT3.5 today, “Give me a 1-paragraph biography of Sydney Portier: Born, Died” the response includes his date of death. Since this is only 5 days after the @elmstedt post, I wonder what explains the difference? Is 3.5 more up-to-date than 4?
This is a shame because a new digital SAT test was released after that cutoff date and the AI has no knowledge of it
Interesting is that the knowledge cutoff is now not only getting disclaimed in almost every answer - instead of fine-tuning on new knowledge, they fine-tuned these refusals on the date!
I got from a GPT-4 with blank system prompt in the playground:
who is the king of england currently?
As of my last update in October 2021, there is no king in England. The current monarch is Queen Elizabeth II.
And then go over to gpt-3.5-turbo, also at top-p 0:
As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, there is no king of England. The current monarch of the United Kingdom is Queen Elizabeth II.
Again, with no system message. This seems like not only a waste of training to just give the wrong answer, but will make it harder for API users who need a useful AI that will answer their questions with knowledge.
It does remind that they made good on their promise of less “as an AI language model”, when you go back to gpt-3.5-turbo-0301: “As an AI language model, I don’t have access to real-time information, but as of 2021, there is no king of England. The current monarch is Queen Elizabeth II.” (but now with even system prompt fiction or roleplay repulsively watermarked with “Ah, the King of England you say?”
That’s because HRM is actually hidden in a vault while her mind engram gets digitised so to achieve true immortality. But chsssst… it’s a secret. 
