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Comment by pixl97

4 days ago

So I asked GPT-o4-mini-high

"On what date will the new moon occur on in August 2025. Use a tool to verify the date if needed"

It correctly reasoned it did not have exact dates due to its cutoff and did a lookup.

"The new moon in August 2025 falls on Friday, August 22, 2025"

Now, I did not specify the timezone I was in so our timing between 22 and 23 appears to be just a time zone difference at it had marked an time of 23:06 PDT per its source.

4 comments

pixl97

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phoe18  4 days ago

Response from Gemini 2.5 Pro for comparison -

``` Based on the search results, the new moon in August 2025 will occur late on Friday, August 22nd, 2025 in the Pacific Time Zone (PDT), specifically around 11:06 PM.

In other time zones, like the Eastern Time Zone (ET), this event falls early on Saturday, August 23rd, 2025 (around 2:06 AM). ```

jcynix  4 days ago

"Use a tool to verify the date if needed" that's a good idea, yes. And the answers I got are based on UTC, so 23:06 PDT should match the 23. for Europe.

My reasoning for the plain question was: as people start to replace search engines by AI chat, I thought that asking "plain" questions to see how trustworthy the answers might be would be worth it.

  • pixl97  4 days ago

    Heh, I've always been neurodivergent enough that I've never been great at 'normal human' questions. I commonly add a lot of verbosity. This said it's worked out well talking to computer based things like search engines.

    LLMs on the other hand are weird in ways we don't expect computers to be. Based upon the previous prompting, training datasets, and biases in the model a response to something like "What time is dinner" can all have the response "Just a bit after 5", "Quarter after 5" or "Dinner is at 17:15 CDT". Setting ones priors can be important to performance of the model, much in the same way we do this visually and contextually with other humans.

    All that said, people will find AI problematic for the foreseeable future because it behaves somewhat human like in responses and does so with confidence.