Alas!
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ChatGPT went down on Wednesday morning – and the timing of its outage couldn’t have been more unfortunate.
As OpenAI’s global chatbot took a major hit for the second time in as many weeks, big tech executives were convening in Washington to make their case to lawmakers about the future of AI.
In attendance was AI startup CEO Sam Altman — who hoped to put a better face on ChatGPT amid increased scrutiny over declining user traffic over the past several months.
According to OpenAI’s status page, an issue described as “elevated error rate and increased latency” was being investigated as of 9 a.m. EST. Then, about an hour later, an update acknowledged an “outage for most conversations with ChatGPT.”
It will take about two hours for troubleshooting to begin before the incident is declared “fixed” — a long time for any site to go down, never mind when Congress sees you as an industry leader.
Outage House
Needless to say, it’s not the best look for the world’s (shrinking) most popular AI product, especially as these outages have increased in frequency over the past few weeks.
The last outage of note was on August 31, during which there was “extreme degradation” of service.
But just two days before that, ChatGPT suffered another “major outage”, blocking users from fully accessing the web UI.
Adding to OpenAI’s concerns, the chatbot is bleeding users for the third month in a row, after reporting its first drop in web traffic in July.
And in a more ceremonial loss, ChatGPT was stripped of its title as the fastest-growing app in history, stripped by Threads.
Tech titans
In Washington, Altman was joined by other industry titans, including tech hyphenate Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
The meeting, known as the AI Insight Forum, was largely organized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“We all share the same incentive to get this right,” Altman said after the closed-door meeting. The New York Times.
We will have to wait and see how honest he is this time. Altman has previously stressed the urgent need for lawmakers to regulate AI — only to turn and mess with the EU, which is doing just that.
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