ChatGPT has apparently been hit by an outage with many users reporting issues assessing the service this morning.
The leading AI chat model reportedly attracts around 700 million weekly active users globally, helping with everything from exam revision to fitness routines and where to get dinner tonight.
Just over a thousand complaints were made to Down Detector at an 8.54am peak on Wednesday morning, with hundreds others in the minutes around.
The issue seems to stop ChatGPT from responding to users when they type a prompt, although not all users appearto be affected:
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Our own perfunctory, and far from empirical research on the site this morning put us firmly in the other camp, with the simple request “is ChatGPT working?” met with silence, in common with many other users highlighting the problem on social media:
ChatGPT’s own service page was incharacteristically slow to pick up on the problem, still not recognising any issues at around 9.30am, and displaying the message: “We’re fully operational. We’re not aware of any issues affecting our systems.”
The company has now caught up with social media, however, displaying the following message:
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is probably the best-known of the current crop of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) tools. It uses natural language processing to generate “human-like” text, answer questions, and create various forms of content. The “GPT” in its name stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” indicating that it has been trained on a massive amount of text and can generate new responses based on the information it has learned.
ChatGPT can perform a wide range of tasks, including writing essays and code, summarizing information, assisting with translations, and holding lifelike conversations with users through text, audio, and image inputs.
OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.
OpenAI’s founders included Elon Musk and current CEO Sam Altman, although Musk is no longer involved with the company and he and Altman have gone on to develop a well-publicised feud since the Tesla boss’s 2018 departure.
