Claude 4's system prompt was published and contains:
"Claude’s reliable knowledge cutoff date - the date past which it cannot answer questions reliably - is the end of January 2025. It answers all questions the way a highly informed individual in January 2025 would if they were talking to someone from {{currentDateTime}}, "
I thought best guesses were that Claude's system prompt ran to tens of thousands of tokens, with figures like 30,000 tokens being bandied about.
But the documentation page linked here doesn't bear that out. In fact the Claude 3.7 system prompt on this page clocks in at significantly less than 4,000 tokens.
Yup. Either the system prompt includes a date it can parrot, or it doesn't and the LLM will just hallucinate one as needed. Looks like it's the latter case here.
Technically they don’t, but OpenAI must be injecting the current date and time into the system prompt, and Gemini just does a web search for the time when asked.
the point is you can't ask a model what's his training cut off date and expect a reliable answer from the weights itself.
closer you could do is have a bench with -timed- questions that could only know if had been trained for that, and you'd had to deal with hallucinations vs correctness etc
just not what llm's are made for, RAG solves this tho
Claude 4's system prompt was published and contains:
"Claude’s reliable knowledge cutoff date - the date past which it cannot answer questions reliably - is the end of January 2025. It answers all questions the way a highly informed individual in January 2025 would if they were talking to someone from {{currentDateTime}}, "
https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts#m...
I thought best guesses were that Claude's system prompt ran to tens of thousands of tokens, with figures like 30,000 tokens being bandied about.
But the documentation page linked here doesn't bear that out. In fact the Claude 3.7 system prompt on this page clocks in at significantly less than 4,000 tokens.
they arent.
a model learns words or tokens more pedantically but has no sense of time nor cant track dates
Yup. Either the system prompt includes a date it can parrot, or it doesn't and the LLM will just hallucinate one as needed. Looks like it's the latter case here.
Technically they don’t, but OpenAI must be injecting the current date and time into the system prompt, and Gemini just does a web search for the time when asked.
right but that's system prompting / in context
not really -trained- into the weights.
the point is you can't ask a model what's his training cut off date and expect a reliable answer from the weights itself.
closer you could do is have a bench with -timed- questions that could only know if had been trained for that, and you'd had to deal with hallucinations vs correctness etc
just not what llm's are made for, RAG solves this tho
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OpenAI injects a lot of stuff, your name, sub status, recent threads, memory, etc
sometimes its interesting to peek up under the network tab on dev tools
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