ChatGPT has a Thursday lie down
- Reference: 1737645416
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/01/23/chatgpt_has_a_thursday_lie/
- Source link:
The generative Artificial Intelligence chatbot fell over on Thursday. Its developer, OpenAI, reported "elevated error rates" on its [1]status page , although, to be frank, that could equally be applied to the output of users that lean a little too heavily on the service.
While the company did not elaborate on the root cause, it went on to say it was "working to implement a fix." At the same time, users hit refresh in the hope that the dread "bad gateway" error might go away and be replaced by a cheery prompt, ready to churn out responses to questions.
[2]
The outage appears widespread. Users in the UK started encountering [3]problems just before midday, and others in the USA also encountered difficulties accessing the service. A glance at social media shows users affected worldwide.
[4]
At its peak, thousands were complaining about the service and were presumably faced with the horror of having to do their day-to-day work without the assistance of OpenAI's chatbot.
OpenAI's latest status update was that it was "continuing to work on a fix for this issue," which will be of scant comfort to all those developers suddenly having to switch back to Stack Overflow for their coding needs.
[5]
The Register contacted OpenAI for more details about the outage and the fix being implemented, but the company has yet to respond. We also asked Microsoft's Copilot why ChatGPT might be down. The chatbot merely confirmed the outage and said, "I know it can be frustrating when you're trying to use the service and it's not working. Is there anything specific you were hoping to use ChatGPT for today?"
The timing of the outage is unfortunate, coming shortly after the announcement of the $500 billion Stargate infrastructure project. Still, it does serve to demonstrate how fragile AI infrastructure can be, so perhaps those billions will be a wise investment. ®
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[1] https://status.openai.com/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z5J2AEx1tDYrMVKhYc7XnwAAAQg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://downdetector.co.uk/status/openai/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z5J2AEx1tDYrMVKhYc7XnwAAAQg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z5J2AEx1tDYrMVKhYc7XnwAAAQg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: The Machine Stops
The machine stops - EM Forster at his best. Let us now observe if there is any impact on human productivity. My guess is not.
The Machine Stops
Listen to Kuno
my guess
is the saudis are helping them revamp it. Maybe the russians too. It's too hard for American engineers.
No AI, No Reply...
"The Register contacted OpenAI for more details about the outage and the fix being implemented, but the company has yet to respond."
Well of course they haven't answered, the chat bot is down! PR and Customer Service are always the first to be replaced with AI. Did you expect it to be different here?
:p
Re: No AI, No Reply...
In all seriousness. I'm noticing a significant drop in pro ruspublican rhetoric across the web forums. Coincidence?
The timing of the outage is unfortunate, coming shortly after the announcement of the $500 billion Stargate infrastructure project. Still, it does serve to demonstrate how fragile AI infrastructure can be, so perhaps those billions will be a wise investment.
I can't see any situation in which spunking $500Bn on a chatbot would be a wise investment. They could build a good chunk of a national high speed rail network for that. Which would be... actually useful.
[1]Also...
SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
SoftBank eh. I see no problems there. It's not as if they've just spent the last 3 years bleeding money out the Vision Fund, setting new records in their asset class for quarterly losses - just barely propped up by strong earnings from ARM. And they also have $3Bn tied up in Perplexity AI - you know, [2]the particularly badly behaved one which is definitely going to get pillaged in copyright suits.
I'm sure doubling down on the hype train will go swimmingly.
[1] https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI#Controversies
It being down would lead to reduced error rates surely?
The Machine Stops
Listen to Kuno.