Researchers with Scale AI have found that search-based AI models may cheat on benchmark tests by fetching the answers directly from online sources rather than deriving those answers through a "reasoning" process.

On their own, AI models suffer from a significant limitation: They're trained at a specific point in time on a limited set of data and thus lack information about anything after that training data cut-off date.

So to better handle inquiries about current events, firms like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity have integrated search capabilities into their AI models, giving them access to recent online information.