Why can’t ChatGPT tell time? | The VergeSkip to main contentThe homepageThe VergeThe Verge logo.The VergeThe Verge logo.TechReviewsScienceEntertainmentAIHamburger Navigation ButtonThe homepageThe VergeThe Verge logo.Hamburger Navigation ButtonNavigation DrawerThe VergeThe Verge logo.Login / Sign UpcloseCloseSearchTechExpandAmazonAppleFacebookGoogleMicrosoftSamsungBusinessCreatorsMobilePolicySecurityTransportationReviewsExpandLaptopsPhonesHeadphonesTabletsSmart HomeSmartwatchesSpeakersDronesScienceExpandSpaceEnergyEnvironmentHealthEntertainmentExpandGamesTV ShowsMoviesAudioAIVerge ShoppingExpandBuying GuidesDealsGift GuidesSee All ShoppingCarsExpandElectric CarsAutonomous CarsRide-sharingScootersOther TransportationFeaturesVideosExpandYouTubeTikTokInstagramPodcastsExpandDecoderThe VergecastVersion HistoryNewslettersExpandThe Verge DailyInstallerVerge DealsNotepadOptimizerRegulatorThe StepbackArchivesStoreSubscribeFacebookThreadsInstagramYoutubeRSSThe VergeThe Verge logo.Why can’t ChatGPT tell time?Comments DrawerCommentsLoading commentsGetting the conversation ready...ReportCloseReportPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ReportAICloseAIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All AITechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechWhy can’t ChatGPT tell time?As a personal assistant, ChatGPT is remarkably, annoyingly bad at this one basic thing.As a personal assistant, ChatGPT is remarkably, annoyingly bad at this one basic thing.by Elissa WelleCloseElissa WelleAI ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Elissa WelleNov 27, 2025, 2:30 PM UTCLinkShareImage: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty ImagesElissa WelleCloseElissa WellePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Elissa Welle is a NYC-based AI reporter and is currently supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. She covers AI companies, policies, and products.ChatGPT, like many chatbots, is pitched as a hyper-competent personal assistant. But among the many things that confuse it, one is particularly confounding: It cannot tell time.When I ask ChatGPT what time it is, I’m never quite sure what I’ll get. Sometimes, it tells me it can’t do it. “I don’t have access to your device’s real-time clock or your location, so I can’t tell the exact local time for you,” it wrote to me at 4:15PM Eastern Standard Time about a week ago. “But I do know today’s date according to my system: 2025-11-20.” (Bolded by ChatGPT, I assume, to make sure I didn’t overlook the things it was doing well.) Sometimes it asks me to specify a city or time zone, only to reveal it can’t reliably check time that way either — “It’s 12:42 PM in New York (Eastern Time, assuming your system clock is correct),” ChatGPT wrote to me at 11:08AM. And sometimes it does provide exactly the correct time, until I ask a couple of minutes later, and it gets it wrong again.We aren’t the first to bring it up. The problem of time comes up frequently on Reddit and ChatGPT’s forums. One user urged OpenAI to “pay attention to this” because it gives “a bad name” to the AI model “with cognitive abilities far superior than my own.” Features like web search have offered some work-arounds. But years after launch, vanilla ChatGPT remains blissfully indifferent to the ticking of the clock — and as absurd as the situation might seem, there’s a simple reason for that.ChatGPT told me this at 10:10AM EST.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’s Gemini, Anthropic’s 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’t include constant, real-time updates about things like time, unless they specifically search the internet for that information.“A language model works in its own space of language and words. It is only referencing things that have entered this space,” said AI robotics expert Yervant Kulbashian, who wrote about the concept of time as perceived by AI in 2024, to The Verge. It’s like a castaway on an island in the middle of the ocean, stocked with a massive collection of books but no watch.Why can’t 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 — where he was located during our interview. “It’s able to tell the time if you give it access to a clock. Otherwise, it’s something that was just born in that moment, in a way,” he said. The timely information was likely “embedded in the context” of the app, he said. He had previously enabled the “Search” function on the ChatGPT app, which means that ChatGPT has permission to tap into his computer’s built-in time tools, in addition to the web, to get the time.RelatedI sent ChatGPT Agent out to shop for meOpenAI told us as much. “The models powering ChatGPT don’t 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,” spokesperson Taya Christianson wrote to The Verge.There are tradeoffs to keeping LLMs aware of the time, Kulbashian said. ChatGPT has finite space in what’s called its context window, or the portion of information “remembered” at any given time. Every time ChatGPT consults a system clock, it adds a piece of information to that context window — to use another metaphor, imagine somebody stacking a stopped clock on a desk every second. “If you start adding more things onto your desk, you have to eventually start pushing things off,” Kulbashian said.Updated sufficiently often, clock clutter could amount to simply noise for the AI system. “You might end up kind of confusing the robot,” Kulbashian said. “If we’re having a conversation, and then somebody, every so often, was popping in and saying, ‘It’s 5:45.’ ‘It’s 5:46 now.’” By contrast, something like the date is relatively easy to include in a system prompt at the start of a chat — which one apparent ChatGPT system prompt leak seems to show.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 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.RelatedOpenAI really, really wants you to start your day with ChatGPT PulseMinervini, who finds blind spots in consumer AI technology as part of his research, says there’s actually a whole list of time-related tasks it hasn’t mastered. He’s 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 “also weird.”Perhaps the bigger issue, for the average user, is that ChatGPT can’t reliably make clear what its limitations are. A human assistant who simply doesn’t know the time might be understandable; one that regularly lies about knowing it would probably get fired. But, of course, large language models aren’t lying — they’re just predicting, as usual, what you want to hear.OpenAI’s Christianson said, “we’re continuing to improve how consistently it knows when to do so.”Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Elissa WelleCloseElissa WelleAI ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Elissa WelleAICloseAIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All AIOpenAICloseOpenAIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All OpenAIReportCloseReportPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ReportTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechMost PopularMost PopularYou can play classic Nintendo games on these custom SNES-inspired Nike sneakersWyze’s new security camera watches your yard from inside your homeI’m officially done with YouTube KidsMicrosoft’s latest 13-inch Surface Laptop is down to $549.99, a new record low priceYou’re buying a Frame TV? 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ChatGPT’s inability to accurately tell time represents a surprisingly persistent and revealing limitation within the capabilities of large language models. While these AI systems can perform a vast array of tasks, from generating creative text formats to answering complex questions, their understanding of fundamental, real-world concepts like time remains surprisingly fragile. This isn’t simply a matter of a software glitch; it highlights a crucial difference in how these models operate compared to human cognition.

At its core, ChatGPT, and similar generative AI systems, are designed to predict the next word in a sequence based on the data they’ve been trained on. They don’t inherently “know” that 3:00 PM exists or that clocks measure time. Instead, they’ve learned to associate the *words* “time,” “clock,” and related concepts with responses that humans would find appropriate. Asking ChatGPT what the time is triggers this learned association, but it lacks a genuine understanding of the temporal dimension.

The problem is exacerbated by the architecture of these models. They operate within a “context window,” which is a limited space where they store and process information. When ChatGPT attempts to determine the time, it adds this query—and potentially its response—to that window. However, this process doesn’t create a stable, accurate representation of time. Simply adding irrelevant information, like a fleeting request for the time, can disrupt the model’s internal state, leading to inaccurate results.

Furthermore, the reliance on internet search – a feature often enabled to bolster ChatGPT’s responses – introduces another layer of complexity. While search can provide a current time, it doesn't fundamentally address the model’s lack of understanding. It merely provides data to be included in the context window, without instilling any real-world understanding.

Several experts have pointed out this issue. Yervant Kulbashian, an AI robotics expert, aptly described it as ChatGPT essentially being “on an island in the middle of the ocean, stocked with a massive collection of books but no watch.” This metaphorical image perfectly captures the model’s reliance on externally provided information rather than an internal sense of time. Researchers have also highlighted the issue of "clock clutter"—the accumulation of inaccurate time-related prompts—further degrading the model's ability to maintain a reliable temporal understanding.

The problem isn’t unique to ChatGPT. Many other large language models share this limitation. It underscores the fundamental difference between mimicking human conversation and genuinely comprehending the world around us. While ChatGPT’s inability to tell time is often presented as a humorous quirk, it’s a surprisingly insightful demonstration of the current state of AI – a system adept at generating convincing text but fundamentally lacking a grounded understanding of the physical world. The persistent struggle with a concept as basic as time serves as a constant reminder of the significant gaps that remain in AI’s cognitive capabilities.