The criticism wasn’t that ChatGPT doesn’t know stuff from 2022, it was that ChatGPT is stating that it can’t tell you because it hasn’t happened yet.
I don’t know if this is because of boilerplate formulations about the cutoff date that aren’t true ChatGPT output, or rather because ChatGPT has a poor understanding of time, as examples shared in previous HN threads have demonstrated.
A more straightforward answer would have been “My training data only goes up until 2021, so I don’t know who is president in 2022.”
However, the answer could be more useful. When you actually ask it “Is Biden president?”, ChatGPT answers “As of my knowledge cutoff in 2021, Joe Biden is the president of the United States, after being inaugurated on January 20, 2021.” So why didn’t it give that information for the first question?
It is a valid criticism that ChatGPT is very inconsistent and often misleading in its representation of what information it is in principle able to provide.
I don’t know if this is because of boilerplate formulations about the cutoff date that aren’t true ChatGPT output, or rather because ChatGPT has a poor understanding of time, as examples shared in previous HN threads have demonstrated.