Exploring Claude/GPT Knowledge Cutoffs and Pre-Training Timelines

Great read and interesting analysis! I’m less charitable toward Anthropic supposedly not distilling ChatGPT for training purposes. Maybe not today, but during the GPT-4 era when Anthropic was the underdog - I can see it happen. Packaged along with some of Amodei’s clever jumping through hoops to prove how that is, in fact, virtuous.

This was great! One thing that wasn't addressed that I always assume, is that a marketing name like "Opus 5" is not a single model, but many models, versions and gets minor updates over time.

I also assumed many questions get routed to simpler models or programs to answer correctly, but it almost surprisingly didn't seem that way from the post.

Anyways, great post.

So Jan 2026 latest, I guess we are due to 2 OOM’s better retraining over the coming years. Curious to see the point at which AI plateaus.