ChatGPT told me this at 10:10AM EST.<\/p>\n Telling time is trivial for any computer and phone thanks to the tiny chips ticking away inside them. But generative AI systems like the large language and visual models powering ChatGPT, Google\u2019s Gemini, Anthropic\u2019s Claude, and others are constructed for a very different purpose. By default, they take in user queries and predict answers based purely on their training data. This doesn\u2019t include constant, real-time updates about things like time, unless they specifically search the internet for that information.<\/p>\n \u201cA language model works in its own space of language and words. It is only referencing things that have entered this space,\u201d said AI robotics expert Yervant Kulbashian, who wrote<\/a> about the concept of time as perceived by AI in 2024, to The Verge. It\u2019s like a castaway on an island in the middle of the ocean, stocked with a massive collection of books but no watch.<\/p>\n Why can\u2019t OpenAI just build a bridge to that island and give ChatGPT access to a system time clock? The short answer is, it can. As I chatted with Pasquale Minervini, who researches natural language processing in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, his desktop ChatGPT app immediately gave him the correct time in Milan, Italy \u2014 where he was located during our interview. \u201cIt\u2019s able to tell the time if you give it access to a clock. Otherwise, it\u2019s something that was just born in that moment, in a way,\u201d he said. The timely information was likely \u201cembedded in the context\u201d of the app, he said. He had previously enabled the \u201cSearch\u201d function on the ChatGPT app, which means that ChatGPT has permission to tap into his computer\u2019s built-in time tools, in addition to the web, to get the time.<\/p>\n OpenAI told us as much. \u201cThe models powering ChatGPT don\u2019t have built-in access to the current time, so for up-to-date facts ChatGPT sometimes needs to call search to pull in the latest information,\u201d spokesperson Taya Christianson wrote to The Verge.<\/p>\n There are tradeoffs to keeping LLMs aware of the time, Kulbashian said. ChatGPT has finite space in what\u2019s called its context window, or the portion of information \u201cremembered\u201d at any given time. Every time ChatGPT consults a system clock, it adds a piece of information to that context window \u2014 to use another metaphor, imagine somebody stacking a stopped clock on a desk every second. \u201cIf you start adding more things onto your desk, you have to eventually start pushing things off,\u201d Kulbashian said.<\/p>\n Updated sufficiently often, clock clutter could amount to simply noise for the AI system. \u201cYou might end up kind of confusing the robot,\u201d Kulbashian said. \u201cIf we\u2019re having a conversation, and then somebody, every so often, was popping in and saying, \u2018It\u2019s 5:45.\u2019 \u2018It\u2019s 5:46 now.\u2019\u201d By contrast, something like the date is relatively easy to include in a system prompt at the start of a chat \u2014 which one apparent ChatGPT system prompt leak<\/a> seems to show.<\/p>\n ChatGPT users can tell the time without too much fuss by asking the chatbot specifically to search for it. (Some other chatbots, like Google Gemini, will automatically search for the time.) You can also use an open-source model context protocol<\/a> to connect an AI application to your data. That said, sending AI models to search the web or letting them access personal data comes with risks, like the bot being injected with malicious prompts that are scattered across the internet, Minervini said.<\/p>\n Minervini, who finds blind spots in consumer AI technology as part of his research, says there\u2019s actually a whole list of time-related tasks it hasn\u2019t mastered. He\u2019s prompted leading AI models with pictures of analog clocks and found that models struggle to read the positions of the two clock arms. Calendars, he told me, are \u201calso weird.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the bigger issue, for the average user, is that ChatGPT can\u2019t reliably make clear what its limitations are. A human assistant who simply doesn\u2019t know the time might be understandable; one that regularly lies about knowing it would probably get fired. But, of course, large language models aren\u2019t lying \u2014 they\u2019re just predicting, as usual, what you want to hear.<\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s Christianson said, \u201cwe\u2019re continuing to improve how consistently it knows when to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Elissa WelleClose Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All by Elissa Welle<\/a><\/p>\n AICloseAI<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All AI<\/a><\/p>\n OpenAICloseOpenAI<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All OpenAI<\/a><\/p>\n ReportCloseReport<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n![\"ChatGPT](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/ChatGPT-response-2025-11-21-at-10.10.24\u202fAM.png\"\/)
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