The decays are probably because there are less training data about recent deaths, and that the pre-training may have started before the knowledge cutoff.
Older models having better rote memorization on slightly obscure facts isn’t that surprising imo. It is not something that has a lot of optimization pressure.
Having multiple variables mixed don’t seem like a big issue for detecting ancestry. False positives will still be highly unlikely—different pretrains will probably have different “forgetting curves”.
GPT 5.2 is dropping before its knowledge cutoff.
The decays are probably because there are less training data about recent deaths, and that the pre-training may have started before the knowledge cutoff.
Older models having better rote memorization on slightly obscure facts isn’t that surprising imo. It is not something that has a lot of optimization pressure.
Having multiple variables mixed don’t seem like a big issue for detecting ancestry. False positives will still be highly unlikely—different pretrains will probably have different “forgetting curves”.