alt Hacker NewsWhen I asked ChatGPT for its training cutoff recently it told me 2021 and when I asked if that's because contamination begins in 2022 it said yes. I recall that it used to give a date in 2022 or even 2023.
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How? I just asked ChatGPT 5.2 for its training cutoff, and it said August 2025. I then tried to dig down to see if that was the cutoff date for the base model, and it said it couldn't tell me and I'd have to infer it from other means (and that it's not a fully well-formed query anymore with the way they do training).
I was double-checking because I get suspicious whenever asking an AI to confirm anything. If you suggest a potential explanation, they love to agree with you and tell you you're smart for figuring it out. (Or just agree with you, if you have ordered them to not compliment you.)
They've been trained to be people-pleasers, so they're operating as intended.
Rule of thumb: never ask chatgpt about its inner working. It will lie or fabricate something. It will probably say something completely different next time