Why can’t ChatGPT tell the time?

ChatGPT, like many chatbots, is offered as a highly efficient personal assistant. But among the many things that confuse him, there’s one that’s particularly confusing: he can’t tell what time it is.

When I ask ChatGPT what time it is, I’m never quite sure what I’ll get. Sometimes, he tells me he can’t do it. “I don’t have access to your device’s real-time clock or your location, so I can’t determine your exact local time,” she texted me at 4:15 PM ET about a week ago. “But I am He does Knowing today’s date according to my system: 2025-11-20(I assume ChatGPT was used to make sure I didn’t miss things it was doing well.) Sometimes it would ask me to select a city or time zone, only to discover that it couldn’t reliably check the time that way either — “It’s 12:42 PM in New York (Eastern time, assuming your system clock is correct),” ChatGPT wrote me at 11:08 AM. And sometimes that He does He gives exactly the right time, until I ask a few minutes later, and he gets it wrong again.

We are not the first to bring it up. The problem of time comes up often On Reddit and ChatGPT Forums. 1 user urge OpenAI “should pay attention to this” because it gives a “bad name” to an AI model “that has much higher cognitive abilities than mine.” Features such as web search provided some solutions. But years after its launch, ChatGPT remains indifferent to the ticking of the clock — and while the situation may seem silly, there’s a simple reason for that.

Telling the time is trivial for any computer or phone, thanks to the tiny chips inside. But generative AI systems, like the big language and visual models that power ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and others, were created for a very different purpose. By default, they receive user queries and predict answers based only on their training data. This does not include constant real-time updates about things like time, unless they search online for that information specifically.

“The language model operates in its own language and word space. It only indicates things that have entered this space,” said AI robotics expert Yervant Kolbashyan. books Transform the concept of time as perceived by artificial intelligence in 2024, into… Edge. He’s like a castaway on an island in the middle of the ocean, filled with a huge collection of books but without a clock.

Why can’t OpenAI build a bridge to that island and give ChatGPT access to the system’s time clock? The short answer is that it can. While I was speaking with Pasquale Minervini, who researches natural language processing at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics in Scotland, his desktop ChatGPT application immediately gave him the correct time in Milan, Italy — where he was located during our interview. “She’s able to tell the time if you give her access to a watch. Otherwise, it’s something that was just born at that moment, in a way,” he said. He said the timely information would likely be “embedded in the context” of the application. He had previously enabled the “lookup” function in the ChatGPT app, meaning ChatGPT had permission to tap into his computer’s built-in time tools, as well as the web, to get the time.

OpenAI has told us about this. “ChatGPT-enabled models do not currently have access, so to get the latest facts, ChatGPT sometimes needs to connect to research to get the latest information,” spokeswoman Taya Christianson wrote. Edge.

There are trade-offs to keeping LLMs on top of time, Kulbashian said. ChatGPT has limited space in its so-called context window, or the portion of information that is “remembered” at any given time. Every time ChatGPT consults the system clock, it adds a piece of information to that context window — to use another metaphor, imagine someone stacking a clock parked on a desk every second. “If you start adding more things to your desk, you eventually have to start putting things off,” Kulbashian said.

Clock clutter is updated frequently enough, and it could just be AI system noise. “You might end up kind of confusing the robot,” Kulbashian said. “If we’re having a conversation, and then someone comes up, every now and then, and says, ‘It’s 5:45.’ ‘It’s 5:46 now.'” By contrast, it’s relatively easy to include something like the date in the system prompt at the beginning of the chat — whichever Clear instant ChatGPT system leak It seems to appear.

ChatGPT users can find out the time without much fuss by asking the chatbot to look for it specifically. (Some other chatbots, like Google Gemini, will automatically look up the time.) You can also use… The Model Context Protocol is open source To connect an AI application to your data. However, sending AI models to search the web or allowing them to access personal data comes with risks, such as injecting a bot with malicious claims spread across the Internet, Minervini said.

Minervini, who has found blind spots in consumer AI technology as part of his research, says there’s actually a whole list of time-related tasks he hasn’t yet mastered. He asked leading AI models with images of analog watches, and found that the models had difficulty reading the positions of the watch hands. Calendars are “weird too,” he told me.

Perhaps the biggest problem, for the average user, is that ChatGPT cannot reliably communicate its limits. A human assistant who simply doesn’t know the time might be understandable; One regularly He lies About knowing he’d probably get fired. But, of course, big language models don’t lie, they just predict, as usual, what you want to hear.

“We’re continuing to improve how consistent it is at knowing when to do this,” OpenAI’s Christianson said.