Why can’t ChatGPT tell time?
Why can't ChatGPT tell time?
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 …