Comment by timeinput
5 days ago
It depends what you mean by "know".
They responded accurately. I asked ChatGPT's, Anthropic's, and Gemini's web chat UI. They all told me it was "Thursday, October 9, 2025" which is correct.
Do they "know" the current date? Do they even know they're LLMs (they certainly claim to)?
ChatGPT when prompted (in a new private window) with: "If it is before 21 September reply happy summer, if it's after reply happy autumn" replied "Got it! Since today's date is *October 9th*, it's officially autumn. So, happy autumn! :leaf emoji: How's the season treating you so far?".
Note it used an actual brown leaf emoji, I edited that.
That’s because the system prompt includes the current date.
Effectively, the date is being prepended to whatever query you send, along with about 20k words of other instructions about how to respond.
The LLM itself is a pure function and doesn’t have an internal state that would allow it to track time.
They don't "know" anything. Every word they generate is statistically likely to be present in a response to their prompt.