Great article, even if it will be interesting to see whether things continue to develop in such a direction or not.

> There's a version of this future where the model card stops listing a knowledge cutoff at all, because what's left in the weights goes stale on a scale of years instead of weeks.

Future?

Even just recently I’ve read of two approaches to this problem:

Cactus have come up with Needle [0][1], which is their tool-calling focused 14 MB model (still an LLM!) – no world knowledge engrained.

And instead of say, tool call structure, VibeThinker [2][3] focuses on reasoning over world knowledge.

Combine these two approaches with a reliable search tool/a safe way of accessing the internet for the model, and you’ve got a probably slightly slower model for factual questions, which on the upside however doesn’t hallucinate.

[0] https://cactuscompute.com/needle

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49246804

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16140

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639240