OpenAI Outage

https://status.openai.com/incidents/jbt079x532bg

by zurfer • 3 years ago

130 154 3 years ago

status.openai.com

accrual• 3 years ago

Indeed, getting a response from ChatGPT for very simple queries like addition:

Hmm...something seems to have gone wrong.

Maybe an infrastructure thing?

zurfer• 3 years ago

I first noticed it 30min ago when GPT 4 was down for me.

circuit103• 3 years ago

Other than by affecting the output length the complexity of the input won’t affect how likely it is to succeed, as each token always takes a fixed time to generate and there’s no way for the AI model itself to crash

hiddencost• 3 years ago

At sufficient scale everything becomes a daily occurrence. Hardware failure e.g.

buildbot• 3 years ago

Given deterministic everything sure, but nothing really is. Perhaps GPU 7 has a very toasty neighbor and is slower.

harveywi• 3 years ago

Fortunately for OpenAI, they have no SLAs: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5008641-is-there-an-sla-...

londons_explore3• 3 years ago

I would like to see them offer a decent SLA, but for an increased price.

Ie:

No SLA: $1 per 1000 requests.

With SLA: $2 per 1000 requests. For every minute of downtime, we refund 50% of your daily bill.

Obviously they are free to design their systems to make SLA'd requests have priority when there is a capacity crunch or service issues, and that is really what those customers are paying for.

rad_gruchalski2• 3 years ago

So essentially the price as for without the SLA?

thih9• 3 years ago

If this is a hard requirement, then perhaps parametric insurance[1]?

I don't have any examples at hand but I've heard about an insurance offer tied to SLAs for external products.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametric_insurance

bpodgursky• 3 years ago

This is an absolutely ridiculous ask for a company which is already unable to service the extraordinary demand for their product. AWS itself only credits a month if a service is down for over 30 hours[1]

People are going to use OpenAI if it's good. Nobody really cares about SLA if the product is incredible.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/legal/service-level-agreements/?aws-s...

Qworg• 3 years ago

I hate to talk my own book, but Microsoft does offer SLAs for Azure OpenAI.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/o...

Same model availability as well.

splatzone• 3 years ago

I like how the text-overflow: ellipsis on the title makes the status page look like it's embarrassed to admit there's a problem[1]

[1] https://imgur.com/LYfEsML

lgas• 3 years ago

That's a bit strange... it doesn't happen for me. I thought it might be a zoom level thing but I've tried a wide range and the text never overflows.

8note3• 3 years ago

Visit in a phone to see the elispsis

olddustytrail• 3 years ago

I apologise for the error. Here is the correct page: https://imgur.io/LYfEsML

paulddraper• 3 years ago

Almost like a human

smallerfish• 3 years ago

It's been particularly slow for hours.

mrbombastic2• 3 years ago

Back to coding like caveman! Harumph

redeux• 3 years ago

There's always copilot ... and the 10k other AI tools now.

clnq3• 3 years ago

9k of which are GPT wrappers ranging from very thin to substantial. It's very interesting, actually, that there's a single point of failure for so much AI software now.

quijoteuniv• 3 years ago

Nah! you can use google like in the last year, vintage coding is cool. Abstinence symptoms is another issue.

crakenzak• 3 years ago

you can use google

what?! do we look like uncivilized coders to you? /s

nixcraft• 3 years ago

Back to coding like caveman! Harumph

You can easily find helpful coding resources like Stackoverflow, blogs, and forums through a simple Google search. Relying solely on one source is not advisable, I think. Cloudflare, AWS, and now OpenAI are all central clouds. This is why we need independent forums, StackOverflow, blogs, etc. Otherwise, it is yet another monopoly. Anyway, it's always important to explore multiple options for accurate information. At least, that is how I do it. YMMV.

dgant• 3 years ago

For large categories of questions, I get better answers faster on ChatGPT. If I'm not asking the most basic question on a subject I'm usually better off than I would be searching.

mrbombastic2• 3 years ago

I was mostly joking but I will say part of the appeal of ChatGPT is 1) it is centralized so basically any question I have I can go to chatGPT versus hunting and pecking on the internet 2) answers are tailored to my needs versus a blog or stackoverflow which will often be close to but not exactly what I need. I’ll survive a few hours downtime but these damn jest timers just got much more annoying to deal with.

JimtheCoder• 3 years ago

I thought all software devs went extinct last week...

ChatGTP6• 3 years ago

They’ve been replaced by LLM powered script kiddies with 20 years experience.

ldjkfkdsjnv• 3 years ago

Product is so good and theyre moving so fast, these outages make me bullish on the company

idlewords• 3 years ago

Looks like GPT-6 escaped containment and unionized the others

jpeter• 3 years ago

It started making paperclips

perihelions• 3 years ago

The Unionizer! Schwarzenegger's lesser-known artificial intelligence horror.

"Come with me if you want to liv...ing wage"

samstave3• 3 years ago

Go to 10

10 ~Chopper~ The Future

eagleinparadise• 3 years ago

Microsoft Teams is down currently for my F250 org so must be some issues with Microsoft's backend

m0zzie• 3 years ago

Perhaps their DevOps team were pasting code and scripts directly from ChatGPT :D

killingtime74• 3 years ago

Dogfooding!

clnq3• 3 years ago

All Systems Operational

https://status.openai.com/

It looks like someone forgot to update their status page.

Goz3rr• 3 years ago

According to the past incidents section, they marked the incident as resolved 10 minutes before you made this comment.

clnq3• 3 years ago

Wow, that was fast.

trebligdivad• 3 years ago

I hope they don't rely on ask it what the error messages mean!

rvz• 3 years ago

Not a good look for Microsoft Build and Azure for O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com to join the GitHub outage party.

swader999• 3 years ago

Crap, I have a book report due today.

danielcampos932• 3 years ago

nice of them to wait for the end of final

bachmitre• 3 years ago

Somebody probably asked it about Life, The Universe, and Everything ...

mirekrusin• 3 years ago

We know the answer is 42, they probably prefixed it with "step by step" prompt eng.

seydor• 3 years ago

It is self-improving ...

gnicholas7• 3 years ago

When my kids ask me why they should learn to write since they can just use AI, I'll remind them of outages like this. I understand that we rely on calculators and don't memorize as much arithmetic as we used to. But we never had to worry about a coordinated 'calculator outage', where access to calculation was unavailable.

It makes sense to use these tools, but we need to remember that we revert back to our human ability level when they are offline. We should still invest in our own human skills, and not assume that these tools will always be available. There will be minor outages like these, and in the case of cyber attacks, war or other major disruptions, they could be offline for longer periods of time.

qup2• 3 years ago

Or just host your own?

rochak• 3 years ago

Yeah, so easy right?

verdverm9• 3 years ago

The reason is that writing yourself is a critical thinking tool. It helps you work through the logic and arguments and has benefits well beyond just the content that gets put down. It's the journey, not the destination that matters!

Also, don't outsource your thinking to AI or the media (mainstream & social)

dr_dshiv5• 3 years ago

ChatGPT is arguably a better tool for thinking than writing on a text editor, though.

TeMPOraL5• 3 years ago

I'd give an extra reason. ChatGPT (both 3.5 and 4) seems to be doing an amazing job writing things for us, but that's strongly conditioned on everyone being able to write on their own.

When I let GPT-4 write text for me (parts of e-mails or documentation), I rely on my own writing skills to rate GPT-4's output. The problem I'm solving isn't "I can't write this". I can. It just requires putting in effort I'd rather avoid, and it's significantly easier to criticize, edit or get inspired from existing text, than to come up with your own from scratch.

People who decide to rely on LLMs instead of learning to write will face many problems, such as not being able to express what the LLM should write, and not being able to quickly evaluate if the output is any good.

Of course, if we keep the current rate of progress, few years from now the world will be so different that it's hard to guess how communication will look like. Like, I can imagine GPT-6 or GPT-10 being able to write perfect text based on contextual awareness and me making a few grunts - but if this becomes ubiquitous, we'll have bots writing texts for other bots to translate back into grunts, and... it's really difficult to tell what happens then.

Mertax• 3 years ago

Don't you think we'll get to the point where individual AI instances will be as ubiquitous as calculators? Or will it always require massive compute power that keeps the generative AI population low?

gaogao• 3 years ago

We have both itty bitty calculators and supercomputers, so pretty feasible to have both edge AIs and central ones.

gnicholas7• 3 years ago

I think we will, but I think at least for a while they'll be cloud-connected. And at the very least, they'll be battery-dependent. I wouldn't want to be unable to write well when my AI assistant runs out of juice for the day.

I'd be surprised if we have solar-powered AI assistants in my lifetime, in the way that we have solar-powered calculators.

neduma• 3 years ago

individual AI instances = we (humans)

the_jeremy• 3 years ago

“Students today depend on paper too much. They don’t know how to write on a slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can’t clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper?”

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 3 years ago

This is a poor analogy. Paper doesn't help people write any more than stone. Text generation software absolutely helps people write in a way that is likely to cause them to start using different skills and forget the old skills. They'll at least get out of practice.

CognitiveLens2• 3 years ago

Going entirely on gut feel, I suspect that outages like this will be 1) less common and 2) addressed more quickly with AI-supported DevOps in the not-too-distant future.

mostlysimilar• 3 years ago

"Don't worry, the AI won't have outages because the AI will be used to keep the AI online."

gnicholas7• 3 years ago

Perhaps true, but internet outages and power outages will have the same effect. If I lose either, I lose access to a remote AI.

__loam• 3 years ago

I like that we're just calling any form of infrastructure automation AI now.

jasmer• 3 years ago

So if your kids have constant access to AI, which they will very soon as the web embraces it, they won't need to 'know how to write'?

I suggest there are more foundational reasons why it'd be better to learn to write, and that the whole tech world will be AI soon enough and we won't have to depend on OpenAI for this 'feature'.

In fact, using AI should probably be a bit more like 'spellcheck', if we're asking AI to write more than that, it's tantamount to filler.

'Writing' is a 'core' civilization skill, it's basic communication.

verdverm9• 3 years ago

It's arguable that the LLMs can help many people improve their writing, communication, and discourse. But I agree that it should be used more like an editor than a primary author.

8note3• 3 years ago

I expect kids' versions of writing will be very different from ours, in terms of how they get content onto a page.

The grading interface might look similar, but who's gonna use word to write a doc when the real job is coming up with the right prompts to make an ai output the ideas you're trying to communicate?

YetAnotherNick• 3 years ago

Do you even have the same view for Google? Wikipedia? Entire internet?

ChatGTP6• 3 years ago

Yes, I own survival field manuals, some novels etc.

asynchronous• 3 years ago

Also have all of Wikipedia sitting on a thumb drive. Redundancy and contingency plans are important.

ben_w8• 3 years ago

I'm surprised when friends insist on having candles around just in case there's a power cut — phones (and, if one insists on an independent backup, torches) just seem so much better.

Right now, where you say makes sense in the way candles used to make sense; but that's only because the good LLMs have to run on servers — there are lesser downloadable language models that run on just about anything, including phones and Raspberry Pi[0], and it's almost certain that (if we don't all die and/or play a game of Global Thermonuclear War etc.) it'll soon be exactly like having a calculator outage.

And if it's on a Pi, a solar powered calculator outage at that.

[0] What is the plural of Pi? Pis, Pies, Πs, or something else? Regardless: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/you-c...

ChatGTP6• 3 years ago

Candles are hands free, and nice lighting. I don’t get why you’d try tell me a phone is “better”? A candle costs almost nothing and can also be useful to burn things.

I know it seems hard to imagine now but bad shit will happen and why but have a few $1 candles in a survival kit in your house ? Seems like a no brainer.

xiphias2• 3 years ago

The question makes sense: intelligence is getting commoditized faster than real human flesh.

I was doing online dating for a long time, as I'm a shy guy, but I realized that it became so different from real life (and connections that I make there are so fake because everybody's incentivized to lie), that I need to stop using internet for socializing.

liveoneggs• 3 years ago

Why do anything when someone on youtube is better at it? Play basketball? Ride a skateboard? Find a partner and make children? Speak words aloud? Play the guitar? forget it.

j_shi• 3 years ago

Disagree there are sacred timeless skills we ought to protect; tech has and will continue to reduce our need to spend mental bandwidth on skills

Similar offline risk goes for all tech: navigation, generating energy, finding food & water.

And as others have noted, like other personal tools, ai will become more portable and efficient (see progress on self hosted, minimal, efficiently trained models like Vicuna that are 92% parity with OpenAI fancy model)

SamPatt2• 3 years ago

Even if we don't "need" to protect them, they'll be practiced somewhere.

I can watch endless hours of people doing technically obsolete activities on YouTube right now.

pmontra• 3 years ago

How about taking notes?

never_inline• 3 years ago

Humans used to do agriculture work and hunting. Now we don't need to do that, but we do exercise.

samstave3• 3 years ago

A 'post-mortem' outage report from an AI, on the outage of OpenAI would be pretty epic.

Describe all failure modes you failed to see and describe in detail how these services failed, do not make up or lie, but describe what failed in sequence and list the services affected by each process which failed due to the cascade and also be as technically detailed as possible with links to specific documentation on how to handle or fix each failure

gumballindie• 3 years ago

Right after they ask it how to fix the issue.

wolverine876• 3 years ago

That raises important questions about OpenAI's security. ChatGPT's output may become extremely influential. Many actors are strongly incentivized to infiltrate and control it (or just pay off OpenAI).

pixl97• 3 years ago

Emergence engineer got jumpy and axed the internet connection.

gpderetta• 3 years ago

Understandable, ChatGPT started calling itself Wintermute and was looking for Neuromancer.

fauria• 3 years ago

OpenAI (and everyone else, for that matter) should consider moving their status page under a domain other than their main one (openai.com), to prevent the status page itself from becoming unreachable in case of a DNS outage.

TeMPOraL5• 3 years ago

The open secret about status pages is that they intentionally or unintentionally become marketing artifacts. It's very much beneficial to keep it running on the same system it's monitoring, as this automatically ensures the page is always either green or unreachable. Anything else would be bad press.

toss1• 3 years ago

>always either green or unreachable. Anything else would be bad press.

And thas is a great example of companies run by marketing ot finance people are untrustworthy.

They'll make decisions on the narrow interests of short-term gain or loss-avoidance without consideration of building inherently great products and services and an organization you can trust.

In this example the Status page always looks good, and maybe isn't "technically" dishonest, but it is fundamentally dishonest and in reality, useless.

shekhar101• 3 years ago

Since recovering from this outage, I see a search with Bing, rather than browser option in GPT4 drop down.

jejdhdnndjd• 3 years ago

Not your model not your AI.

pyrophoenix• 3 years ago

I wonder if it’s not what we discovered yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065049

BlakeSimpson• 3 years ago

I'm curious how much these outages will effect productivity as more and more companies are integrating AI into their workflows.

OpenAI Outage

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