Google and Technion find frontier LLMs often 'know' facts they fail to recall
A new study from Google Research and Technion shows that when models like GPT-5 and Gemini-3 hallucinate, the underlying fact is usually already stored in their parameters rather than missing entirely. The researchers found these models encode 95-98% of tested facts, but often fail to surface them during generation due to retrieval, not storage, limits. They propose 'fact-level profiling' to separate whether a fact is encoded versus reliably retrievable across different phrasings.