ChatGPT Hit With Short but ‘Major’ Outage

OpenAI’s ChatGPT suffered a short, albeit “major,” outage early Wednesday (Nov. 8).

The service hiccup began just before 9 a.m. Eastern Time, coming two days after the company’s high-profile announcement of its new store.

“Between 5:42 AM – 7:16 AM PT we saw errors impacting all services,” the company wrote on its status page. “We identified the problem and implemented a fix. We are now seeing normal responses from our services.”

The company also reported a partial outage Tuesday (Nov. 7) evening. OpenAI officials said earlier this week that ChatGPT now has around 100 million weekly active users, with more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies using the platform, up from 80% in August.

A report Wednesday by CNBC noted that Claude 2, the chatbot operated by OpenAI rival Anthropic, also experienced problems at the same time, citing “unexpected capacity constraints” preventing the AI from responding to messages.

OpenAI on Monday (Nov. 6) hosted its first in-person event, at which it unveiled the most powerful of its artificial intelligence (AI) models to date: GPT-4 Turbo.

“GPT-4 Turbo is more capable and has knowledge of world events up to April 2023,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “It has a 128k context window so it can fit the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt.”

The company says GPT-4 Turbo has a context window four times greater than GPT-4 (roughly 100,000 words) and has a knowledge cutoff of April 2023, whereas GPT-4’s knowledge only goes up to September 2021.

“We are just as annoyed as all of you — probably more — that GPT4’s knowledge ended in 2021,” OpenAI founder Sam Altman said at Monday’s event. “We will try to never let it get that out of date again.”

In addition to GPT-4 Turbo, the company also announced plans to lower the prices charged to developers using its software and will begin letting them create custom versions of GPT-4.

This later move, PYMNTS wrote this week, shows OpenAI “betting on natural language prompts as being a future-fit interface for users to engage with AI technology as the innovation matures and adoption grows.”

“By making it easy for everyday users to create GPTs, the company hopes that more users will do so,” the report added.

Two million developers worldwide are already working with OpenAI’s products, and the company gave away $500 in credits to the Developer Day audience to inspire them to start building with its new tools.