Your line of thinking also presupposes that Bard is self aware about that type of thing. You could also ask it what programming language it's written in, but that doesn't mean it knows and/or will answer you.
I don't lack awareness of the limitations of pretrained models. I'm evaluating its ability to employ chain of reasoning, in combination with its plugins, to get me an obvious answer.
Me: I see. Google made an announcment today saying that Bard was now using a fine-tuned version of their "Gemini" model
Bard: That's correct! As of December 6, 2023, I am using a fine-tuned version of Google's Gemini model ...
The LLM itself does not KNOW anything.
The issue is that it failed to employ chain-of-reasoning. It knows who "it" is - its initial seed prompt tells it is Bard. Therefore, asking it, "Are you running Gemini Pro?" should be ~equivalent to "Is Bard running Gemini Pro?" but it interpreted one of those as having such ambiguity it couldn't answer.
Whether it needed to search the Internet or not for the answer is irrelevant.
If I ask it who it is, it says it is Bard. It is aware of the launch that occurred today. It cites December 6th.
It just very incorrectly felt that I was asking an ambiguous question until I restate the same question again. It's not great.