Warum kann ChatGPT die Uhrzeit nicht anzeigen?

It’s waiting before encrypting everything and holding us hostage with ransom

Sigh. I feel like I need to shout this out loud but it’s because it’s not AI, it’s a LLM chatbot. It’s like asking why Clippy wasn’t able to do your taxes.

Its like copying someone else’s homework. You’re fine until the teacher asks you a direct question where you cant peek.

Can you tell the time without a clock? All these „AI can’t do x“ posts are pointless and ignore where AI development is going.

AI is being massively extended by the introduction of „tools“ via MCP. With these, you can get an AI to do almost anything – the LLM is simply a natural language translation layer. Which is actually a perfect use for LLMs.

So ChatGPT can actually tell the time, because someone gave it a clock tool.

How do you (a human) tell the time? With a clock tool.

I just told it to check the time every time I checked in with it to confirm the date and time. It still had issues being consistent.

I asked ChatGPT why it can’t tell time. This was the response:

I can understand and talk about time conceptually, but I don’t have built-in real-time awareness.
Here’s why:

>⏱️ 1. I don’t have an internal clock

>I don’t continuously track seconds or minutes like a computer’s operating system does. Each message you send is processed independently, so I don’t “feel” time passing between them.

>📅 2. My knowledge of dates depends on what I’m told

>I know the current date only because it’s included in the system message (“Current date: 2025-11-27”). If that weren’t given, I wouldn’t know what day it is.

>🔍 3. I can estimate time only if you give me references

>If you tell me “it’s 3:00 PM now,” then ask again later, I won’t know how much time has passed unless you explicitly say so.

>🧠 4. It’s intentional

>Not tracking real time protects privacy and prevents mistaken assumptions about your location, schedule, or identity.

>If you want me to help with time calculations—like “remind me in 10 minutes” or “how many hours until X?”—just give me the timestamps and I’ll calculate them!

It does not perceive time like a human does. Instead it is trying to give the most likely answer to the question „what time is it?“ based on its training. However its training data likely contains numerous examples of this question with a different answer each time, which will just cause it to hallucinate a wrong answer.

Gen Alpha can’t read clocks.

Is this really where we are with commonplace understanding of technology now-commonplace?

W T F.

Just asked mine and it was wrong ….. For all the ppl who’re dismissing the article

I then asked again, and got this reply:

„I don’t have access to the real-time clock of the world.
I can’t see what time it actually is right now in…. and the “local hour” metadata you saw earlier is not a live clock — it’s often wrong.

I can calculate anything based on the time you give me — but I cannot pull the live current time myself.

Give me the time showing on your device, and I’ll sync from there.“

And now Kids spell Bubble again

It should be possible with augmented retrieval. Just pass in the time as input token or vector along with rest of the input. A downside is that it would be delayed by inference time.

This article brought to you by AI hype.

It can with Tools that tell time.

LLM’s are not the kind of artificial intelligence people usually think of. It’s essentially just the autocomplete function on your phone on steroids.

It doesn’t know anything and everything it says is how it thinks a human would respond to that prompt. It does not have an internal clock to tell the time.

That’s so weird, Gemini works fine. I used to ask it for time zones and other countries all the time.

It’s a word calculator. It doesn’t necessarily know anything per se. It isn’t sourcing data to make determinations. Rather it simply spits out the most common words that go together.

Why can’t clocks eat chocolate?

Because they’re not designed to. LLMs are also not conscious, at least in any way like a human is. They don’t do anything when they’re not inferencing. Experiencing the flow of time is kind of built into organic beings.