I've personally never scaled a B2B&C company from 0 to over 1 billion users in less than a year, but I do feel like it's probably pretty hard. Especially setting up something like a good support organization in a time of massive labor shortages seems like it would be pretty tough.

I know they have money, but money isn't a magic wand for creating people. They could've also kept it a limited beta for much longer, but that would've killed their growth velocity.

So here is a great product that provides no SLA at all. And we all accept it, because having it most of the time is still better than having it not at all ever.

> I say this as a huge fan of GPT, but it's amazing to me how terrible of a company OpenAI is and how quickly we've all latched onto their absolutely terrible platform.

Your example is clearly not acceptable, but I can see reasons for it.

OpenAI apparently was somewhere between "I can't see people finding this useful" and "I guess" when deciding on releasing ChatGPT at all in the first place.

If that's the case, I doubt they were envisioning a flood of users, who needed a customer support person to handle their case. They have to spin-up an entire division to handle all of this. And I'm sure some of the use-cases are going to get into complex technical issues that might be hard to train people for.

They can no longer remain a heads-down company full of engineers working on AI.

I'm not excusing it, but I can see why things like your situation might occur. Although 6 months for a response is obviously ridiculous. If you are paying them a significant amount of money, and it is impacting your business, then that's all on OpenAI to fix ASAP.

ChatGPT has been broken for me for two months, regardless of whether I use the iOS app or the web app. The backend is giving HTTP 500 errors – clearly a problem on their end. Yet in two months I haven’t been able to get past their first line of support. They keep giving me autogenerated responses telling me to do things like clear my cache, turn off ad blockers, and provide information I’ve already given them. They routinely ignore me for weeks at a time. And they continue to bill me. I see no evidence this technical fault has made it to anybody who could do anything about it and I’m not convinced an actual human has seen my messages.

OpenAI is relatively young on the adoption and scaling front.

Also, they need to remain flexible most likely in their infrastructure to make the changes.

As an architecture guy, I sense when the rate of change slows down more SLA type stuff will come up, or may be available first to Enterprise customers who will pay for the entire cost of it. Maybe over time there will be enough slack there to extend some SLA to general API users.

In the meantime, monitoring API's ourselves isn't that crazy. Great idea to use more than one service.

> I had a bug that wouldn't let me login to my work OpenAI account at my new job 9 months ago.

I also cannot login on Firefox (latest version) with strict privacy settings and AdNauseam on desktop.. and a few weeks ago they broke their website on iOS v14 as well for no apparent reason (it certainly didn't make me to download their app since that require v16.1+).

Let's not forget the most basic problem with OpenAI: It isn't open.