Why can't ChatGPT show the time?

ChatGPT, like many chatbots, presents itself as a personal assistant.

But among the many things that confuse it, one is particularly strange: it can't tell time.

When ChatGPT is asked what time it is, it doesn't give an accurate answer, writes the Verge.

“I don't have access to your device's real-time clock or your location, so I can't tell you the exact local time,” the chatbot often says.

Sometimes it asks for a city or time zone to be specified, only to find that it can't check the time that way either.

The issue of time is often raised on Reddit and ChatGPT forums.

One user asked OpenAI to "pay attention to this" because it gives "cognitive AI models a bad name."

Telling time is simple for every computer and phone thanks to the tiny chips that run inside them.

But generative AI systems, like the large language and visual models that power ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and others, are built for a very different purpose.

By default, they take users' questions and predict answers based solely on their training data.

This does not include constant real-time updates about things like the weather, unless they specifically search the Internet for that information.