The Machine Stops
Listen to Kuno.
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 …
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 ...).
"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
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.