Back to the Future: Bringing Ollama Date-Blind Models to the Present

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

A while back I wrote about my local AI stack — Ollama on a Mac mini, Open WebUI on a Proxmox LXC, SearXNG keeping web search private. It mostly just works. Then one day I noticed something strange.

I asked Gemma 4 to research a topic with web search — something that had just been published that same day in a blog post. The search results came back, full of 2026 dates, and instead of using them Gemma 4 pushed back: it accused me of testing it, as if I’d planted fake future-dated content to see whether it would fall for it. As far as Gemma was concerned it was still some day in 2024, so the actual present looked like a setup. Meanwhile Ministral, running on the same Ollama instance through the same Open WebUI, knew exactly what day it was.

Gemma on René Welches

Back to the Future: Bringing Ollama Date-Blind Models to the Present