back to article ChatGPT has a Thursday lie down

Reactivate your brain. ChatGPT has gone down. The generative Artificial Intelligence chatbot fell over on Thursday. Its developer, OpenAI, reported "elevated error rates" on its 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 …

  1. TonyJewell

    The Machine Stops

    Listen to Kuno.

    1. MyffyW Silver badge

      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.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The Machine Stops

        Found it (1909)! In UC Davis ECS 188: Ethics in an Age of Technology reading materials (25-page PDF): "Oh, to-morrow — some fool will start the Machine again, to-morrow" (or to-day in this case ...).

  2. TonyJewell

    The Machine Stops

    Listen to Kuno

    1. Hubert Cumberdale Silver badge

      Re: The Machine Stops

      Is there an echo in here?

  3. Omnipresent Silver badge

    my guess

    is the saudis are helping them revamp it. Maybe the russians too. It's too hard for American engineers.

  4. lglethal Silver badge
    Trollface

    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

    1. Omnipresent Silver badge
      Big Brother

      Re: No AI, No Reply...

      In all seriousness. I'm noticing a significant drop in pro ruspublican rhetoric across the web forums. Coincidence?

  5. rg287 Silver badge

    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.

    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, 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. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

      > They could build a good chunk of a national high speed rail network for that. Which would be... actually useful.

      You forgot a century of US regulations specifically designed to allow train stations only where useless. Guess which lobby pushed those regulations, and does everything it can to keep it that bad.

      Most other countries do it the other 'round the public transport infrastructure. I am always amazed how 'muricans say that Germany has a very good or even fantastic public transport, where as I see our two southern neighbours, Austrian and Swiss, kept their quality which eroded here after that pseudo-privatization > 30 years so.

      It is better in bigger cities with their separate rail systems (S-Bahn and U-Bahn), but there is a lot of room for improvement.

      1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

        Can't argue over room for improvement, but a train trip today from Berlin to Prague was really rather pleasant; significantly better than a plane would have been.

        Mind you, I think that's run by Czech Rail, not DB.

        1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

          > I think that's run by Czech Rail, not DB.

          Then it was punctual, I suppose.

          The train quality itself is not a problem with DB, it is the punctuality degradation over the last 30 years.

      2. Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

        "You forgot a century of US regulations specifically designed to allow train stations only where useless."

        I don't know about that. At the outset, our train station (and bus station) was built close to the business center of our city. Over time, business moved away. Because that's where all the hobos congregate.

        Go figure. That's how they arrive in town.

    2. UnknownUnknown

      Surprised it’s not scum like Blackrock or Goldman Sachs.

      At least they are ‘Mercian.

  6. katrinab Silver badge
    Trollface

    It being down would lead to reduced error rates surely?

  7. BartyFartsLast Silver badge

    Maybe

    It's WFH and had a nap?

  8. John Miles

    Someone accidently feed in this week's news

    and it decided that Skynet had the right idea

  9. Hubert Cumberdale Silver badge

    It was a pain in the arse. Right when I needed it to do my work (badly) for me.

  10. Rich 2 Silver badge

    The generative Artificial Intelligence chatbot fell over on Thursday

    Yay - some good news for once!!

  11. JWLong Silver badge

    "Continuing to work on a fix for this issue,"

    I got the fix, just turn the servers off, problem fixed!

  12. Omnipresent Silver badge

    Operator

    Open AI just announced a new type of AI that will take over your life, so you don't have to live it. It will also sell your life to any and all comers, including foreign and domestic. Looks like it might be a joint venture with anthropic.

    Big Brother is joining forces and consolidating.

  13. sketharaman

    Not a developer but I was facing an API rate limit error on Google Sheets yesterday and I went to ChatGPT. It was down. I'd to go to Stack Overflow. Half an hour of faffing around there to no avail. Then ChatGPT came back up and I had my problem solved in one minute.

  14. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

    Remotely Controlling Big Data Centers and Networking Equipment

    With great power comes the ability to mis-mouse-click and really screw things up.

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