Knowledge Cutoff

Benched.ai Editorial Team

The knowledge cutoff is the most recent date of data that a model was trained on; events after this date are unknown unless retrieved externally.

Impact Areas

Area	Effect
Factual accuracy	Outdated info after cutoff
Security patches	Model may suggest vulnerable versions
Regulatory compliance	Out-of-date laws

Mitigation Techniques

Technique	How It Works	Trade-off
Retrieval augmentation	Fetch latest docs at runtime	Adds latency
Fine-tuning	Ingest post-cutoff data	Requires compute
System disclaimer	Warn user of cutoff	UX noise

Current Cutoffs (2025)

Model	Cutoff
GPT-4o	Oct 2023
Claude 3 Opus	Dec 2023
Gemini 1.5 Pro	Feb 2024

Implementation Tips

Include cutoff date in system prompt so model can self-report.
Cache external retrieval results to reduce latency.
Monitor when cutoff causes hallucinated "future" events.