Why can’t ChatGPT tell you the exact time?

ChatGPT, like many chatbots, is billed as a super-efficient personal assistant. But this very smart chatbot has a major problem and it cannot tell users the exact time.

When we ask ChatGPT what time it is, we can’t be sure what the answer will be, The Verge reports. The chatbot sometimes says that it can’t do this or gives responses like “I don’t have access to the real time on your device or your location, so I can’t tell you the exact local time.” But what is the real reason for this?

ChatGPT can only announce the time if it has access to your system clock

This issue has also been raised in the Reddit social network and ChatGPT forums, and many users are looking for an answer for it.

Telling the time for a computer or mobile phone is very simple thanks to the chips embedded in them. But generative AI systems like the large linguistic and visual models that power Anthropic’s Gemina, ChatGPT, and Claude are built for an entirely different purpose. By default, these models receive user input and predict responses based solely on their training data. This data does not include real-time updates on things like time, unless they specifically search the Internet for that information.

But why doesn’t OpenAI allow ChatGPT to access the system clock? The short answer is that OpenAI can do just that. For example, one of the researchers from the University of Edinburgh can access the exact time in the ChatGPT desktop app because he gave this chatbot access to the system clock.

“The models that feed ChatGPT don’t have internal access to the current clock, so to get the most up-to-date information, sometimes ChatGPT needs to use the lookup feature to get the latest information,” said OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson.

According to Yervant Kolbashian, an artificial intelligence and robotics expert, keeping large language models (LLMs) running over time has its drawbacks. ChatGPT has a limited amount of space in something called a context window, or the portion of information it remembers at any given moment. Each time ChatGPT refers to the system clock, a piece of information is added to this context window.

If the clock is updated regularly, this amount of data can be treated as mere noise to the AI ​​system. “You might end up confusing the robot a bit,” Kolbashian said. Suppose we are having a conversation and then every now and then someone comes and says it is 5:45. It is now 5:46. In contrast, something like a date is relatively easy to enter in a system directive at the start of a chat.