Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
Search
Stuff
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works
Stuff Features
Your AI Chatbot isn't glitching – it's just stuck reading yesterday's newspaper
Ask ChatGPT who won last month’s election, a recent soccer score, or what the new iPhone costs, and you’ll likely get a confident, detailed answer. You’ll also have a decent chance it’s wrong.
The reason isn’t a bug or a glitch in the Matrix. It’s a knowledge cutoff – the point where an AI model simply stopped learning.
Every chatbot is built by training on a vast pile of text, hoovered up to a fixed date. After that, the model is frozen. It doesn’t keep reading the news, scrolling social media, or watching the world move on, no matter how many months you keep chatting with it.
Ask about anything before that date and it’s often impressively accurate. Ask about anything after, and it’ll confidently guess – and sometimes get it completely wrong.
That’s the hallucination problem in a nutshell: the model isn’t lying, it just doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.
So why not update it constantly? Cost, mostly. Training a large language model isn’t like installing a software patch. It demands vast amounts of computing power, electricity and time – weeks or months – so companies do it in batches, then ship the result and call it a new version.
That’s part of why you’ll see different knowledge cutoffs depending on which chatbot, and which version of it, you’re using. Some are months out of date. Others are surprisingly current.
OpenAI’s current flagship, GPT-5.5, has built-in training knowledge that goes up to 1st December, 2025.
Google’s Gemini doesn’t have a strict knowledge cutoff date. Instead its core underlying model is regularly updated, and it can also search the web in real-time. It’s core training data includes information up to early 2026.
Anthropic’s Claude splits things into two separate dates entirely: one for when its knowledge is most complete and reliable, and a later one marking the outer edge of what it was trained on at all. It’s reliable knowledge cutoff is the end of January 2026.
The workaround most companies have landed on is bolting a web search tool onto the chatbot, letting it step outside its own frozen memory and check the live internet when it needs to. It’s a patch rather than a fix, and it only works if the AI actually decides to use it.
Here’s the bit more people need to understand before trusting an AI’s answer on anything time-sensitive: stock prices, sports results, who’s currently in government, the latest phone release. Treat all of it with a healthy dose of “let me just double check.”
Ask your chatbot what its cutoff date is. If it hasn’t searched the web, it’s working purely from memory, and that memory has an expiry date like everything else.
Liked this? 7 reasons to think twice about using ChatGPT, or any chatbot, for important health advice
As Buying Guide Editor, Spencer is responsible for all e-commerce content on Stuff, overseeing buying guides as well as covering deals and new product launches. Spencer has been writing about consumer tech for over eight years. He has worked on some of the biggest publications in the UK, where he covered everything from the emergence of smartwatches to the arrival of self-driving cars. During this time, Spencer has become a seasoned traveller, racking up air miles while travelling around the world reviewing cars, attending product launches, and covering every trade show known to man, from Baselworld and Geneva Motor Show to CES and MWC. While tech remains one of his biggest passions, Spencer also enjoys getting hands-on with the latest luxury watches, trying out new grooming kit, and road-testing all kinds of vehicles, from electric scooters to supercars.
Watches, travel, grooming, transport, tech
As soon as the iOS 27 Developer Beta was available, I installed it on a spare iPhone and started using Siri AI.
How Google Gemini and Apple Siri responded to a standard set of questions – and what I thought of the responses
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and the rest increasingly want to be your personal health assistant. Here’s why you shouldn’t ditch real doctors just yet
Get the Stuff newsletter in your inbox!
Here’s our guide to all the best streaming services – Netflix, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, Max, Hulu, Peacock and Paramount+
Your AI Chatbot isn’t glitching – it’s just stuck reading yesterday’s newspaper
The very best premium music, video, art, design, entertainment, work and study apps for your iOS devices
The best smart speaker options will listen, learn and lend a helping hand
Check out the best wireless earbuds from affordable in-ear options to premium models by Apple, Beats, Bose, and more
GameHub freed my Steam gems from Windows PCs, letting me play them anywhere. And now the app is coming to Apple gear
Stuff
Kelsey Media, The Granary, Downs Court, Yalding Hill, Yalding, Kent ME18 6AL. © 2021 Kelsey Media Ltd, kelsey.co.uk
