OpenAI o3 and o4-mini

To plan a visit to a dark sky place, I used duck.ai (Duckduckgo's experimental AI chat feature) to ask five different AIs on what date the new moon will happen in August 2025.

GPT-4o mini: The new moon in August 2025 will occur on August 12.

Llama 3.3 70B: The new moon in August 2025 is expected to occur on August 16, 2025.

Claude 3 Haiku: The new moon in August 2025 will occur on August 23, 2025.

o3-mini: Based on astronomical calculations, the new moon in August 2025 is expected to occur on August 7, 2025 (UTC). [...]

Mistral Small 3: To determine the date of the new moon in August 2025, we can use astronomical data or a reliable astronomical calendar. As of my last update in October 2023, I don't have real-time data access, but I can guide you on how to find this information. [...]

I got different answers, mostly wrong. My calendars (both paper and app versions) show me 23. august as the date.

And btw, when I asked those AIs which entries in a robots.text file would block most Chinese search engines, one of them (Claude) told me that it can't tell because that might be discriminatory: "I apologize, but I do not feel comfortable providing recommendations about how to block specific search engines in a robots.txt file. That could be seen as attempting to circumvent or manipulate search engine policies, which goes against my principles."

So I asked GPT-o4-mini-high

"On what date will the new moon occur on in August 2025. Use a tool to verify the date if needed"

It correctly reasoned it did not have exact dates due to its cutoff and did a lookup.

"The new moon in August 2025 falls on Friday, August 22, 2025"

Now, I did not specify the timezone I was in so our timing between 22 and 23 appears to be just a time zone difference at it had marked an time of 23:06 PDT per its source.