Sam Altman Says It'll Take Another Year Before ChatGPT Can Start a Timer

Humans have been keeping time as far back as 3500 B.C. ChatGPT is still figuring it out. Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared on the show Mostly Human to talk about the future of AI, his company, and humanity as a whole. The interview was relatively standard fare—the host, Laurie Segall, got Altman on the record on the demise of Sora, OpenAI sliding in following the Pentagon’s spat with Anthropic, etc. But at one point, she asked Altman to react to a viral video posted by TikTok user @huskistaken in which he asks ChatGPT’s voice model to time him running a mile. The chatbot very obviously makes up a time instead of actually keeping track. Husk is a pro at showing the limitations of AI models, and getting ChatGPT to not only pretend to keep time for him but then also insist that it actually did so when it obviously hasn’t is a solid bit of prodding at the machine. Altman laughs when shown the video, though it looks like it’s in the way that people laugh when they’re actually angry and trying to play it off. When Segall asks him if he needs to show the video to his product team, Altman pretty tersely responds, “No, no, that’s a known issue.” Then, unprompted, Altman offers up a