Reminder: LLMs don’t have current information by default

I keep seeing posts where people are shocked that ChatGPT got current events wrong or made something up. This isn’t a bug. LLMs have a knowledge cutoff and no native access to live information. If you ask it about something that happened last week without enabling search, it’s going to hallucinate: that’s not the model malfunctioning, that’s the model doing exactly what you’d expect a model without internet access to do (they’re not omnipotent) Before you post a screenshot calling it gaslighting: check whether search was enabled. If it wasn’t, that’s the whole story. Enable search.