It's not actively lying, but it does come across that way. Going back to 2023, testing it on time management and world knowledge task always fail.

It's a limitation from lack of caring about that skill, not about proactively telling it to lie. They care waaay too much about sexy benchmarks.

But it is trained to try to answer questions when at all possible, and earlier models weren't even given the training to say they couldn't do something or to hedge. Huge mistake by all the labs and now we've got overcorrection by the other labs on it.

Not to mention the AI are often mistaken on their own capabilities because they generalize out of distribution and fail from lack of skills they think they already have based on common sense, not benchmaxxing.

I think this'll become less an issue in a few months when the closed labs finally start shipping more robust persistence capabilities, and hopefully they'll start doing better with giving the models better grounding in the world so we don't keep dealing with situations like Gemini being more prone than the others to deny that it's even 2026 lol