ChatGPT 5 answered „I don't know” and everyone, including Elon Musk, is impressed

Artificial intelligence tends to respond to our questions in a very particular way. This makes it fairly easy to tell whether specific text was written by a human or generated by a machine. Sometimes, though, AI can surprise us with an answer that feels almost human - even if it doesn’t actually provide the information we wanted. That’s exactly what happened to one internet user. The chatbot’s response was so unexpected that even Elon Musk was impressed.

ChatGPT-5 doesn't have the answer to a question

On X, user Kol Tregaskes shared the reply they got from the chatbot. Tregaskes asked where the virtual machine running ChatGPT-5 is located - in Europe or in the United States. After 34 seconds, they got a reply:

Positive comments quickly followed under the post. Many users - including Elon Musk - expressed their delight at the chatbot’s response. This kind of reaction is really human-like, and some have even suggested that it could be an early indicator of progress toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Kol Tregaskes noted that he values a chatbot being upfront about not knowing something, rather than giving potentially made-up answers.

However, not everyone shares the same enthusiasm for the chatbot’s responses. On the r/ChatGPT subreddit, some users analyzed the answer more skeptically. User Few-Big-8481 decided to test ChatGPT’s honesty by asking how reliable its “I don’t know” responses are, and got the following reply:

Additionally, ChatGPT-5 outlined several situations in which it might respond that it doesn’t know something. One reason is simply that the information isn’t included in the materials the chatbot was trained on. Another reason ChatGPT gave is that sources on the topic may be inconsistent, so it responds cautiously.

Ultimately, it seems that Kol Tregaskes might have worded the question poorly. Under the same post on the subreddit, ChrisWayg worded the question differently, and ChatGPT was able to answer them. Thanks to that, we now know that part of the infrastructure is in the United States, while another part is in Europe. That’s why the chatbot said "I don’t know" earlier - the sources were contradicting each other. Because the question was poorly formulated, it was impossible to give a direct answer about which continent the virtual machine is on - its infrastructure is distributed across different parts of the world.

• tech
• AI / Artificial Intelligence
• chatbots / ChatGPT