There’s a good reason they say that LLMs are basically fancy autocorrect. They use billions (or trillions for newer frontier models) of parameters and all kinds of neural network voodoo and have been trained on a ton of data to make it sound intelligent. Since it’s kinda like querying a static database (except not deterministic because reasons), there’s no way it would know the date and time. However, they can now use “tools”, which are pieces of software that do one thing or another. And they can “think”, which is just the AI re-prompting it more or less. The LLMs have been trained to output a sequence to call tools when available and applicable. The software running it (in the case of a local LLM, it’s often ollama or the much better llama.cpp) then calls the tool with the parameters specified and returns the data into the LLM’s context. At the end of the day, much of all the fancy agent magic is injecting new data into the context of an LLM.

So now that they have tools, this is Qwen 3.5 9B (9 billion parameters), a Chinese model, running on my ol’ RTX 3060ti.

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I tried it twice, both times I got the date and time though the code it used was different (first time did not output date, time and then datetime, it only did datetime).

ChatGPT on the web interface did the same for me, but it’s possible that if you call it via an API or something then it won’t. I don’t pay for it so I can’t test that.

However, this is the critical bit: I made it fairly obvious that I want to know the date and time. If you don’t do this, it won’t have the date and time in context.

Also, I created a new chat and asked it when the next bus from Tallinn to Tartu is. It looked up a bunch of websites, mostly focusing on LuxExpress, and gave me 7 AM as a result. Thing is, LuxExpress isn’t the only bus company in Estonia. Their first bus might leave at 7, but there’s another one at 6 AM. This is a very small model and fancier ones will likely perform better, but I think this is a great example of how these things might make mistakes: They don’t actually think, they just fake it by re-prompting themselves and calling tools (including web searches, which is probably one of the most useful ones for chatbots in particular). An actual human would just go to tpilet.ee or peatus.ee and get the full schedule of all or most bus companies.