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Javier Alvarado
Javier Alvarado

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How do you get around an LLM's knowledge cutoff?

  • ChatGPT's knowledge cutoff is October 2023
  • Claude 3.5 Sonnet's knowledge cutoff is April 2024
  • Gemini 2.0 Flash's knowledge cutoff is August 2024

This means that, by default, the LLMs don't know about updates to languages/libraries/frameworks after these dates. What's your preferred method for working around this? Feel free to include answers for LLMs and/or other AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, etc.

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Clay Ferguson

I think I've had limited success mentioning what versions of things I'm using, in my AI prompts, so that it gives me better results. When it comes to software development this is a big issue for everyone (i.e. when the AI generates code that mixes incompatible versions of things etc), so it does need some kind of solution. Perhaps better annotation of training data (code) that includes timestamps and/or version numbers, might address this some day, so you can ask questions to LLMs and then perhaps give date-ranges for what you want it consider, etc.

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Javier Alvarado

Thanks for responding! Mentioning the version numbers is a good tip. And I agree that it's a big issue. I might write an article based on what I've found so far in my research.

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Clay Ferguson

Cool. I followed you, and will be interested in what you find out!

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Javier Alvarado

Hi Clay. I just published my article here: dev.to/jhonkaman/the-knowledge-cut...

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Clay Ferguson

Cool. thanks!