ChatGPT Is Down | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT Is Down

status.openai.com

70 pointsqpleple70 comments

Future dystopia:

Our systems are offline, and we don’t know what to do. Typically when we have a problem, we ask the system how to solve it, but it says it’s unavailable. We have tried asking each other, but nobody knows what to ask exactly.

Hopefully we'll have more than one company who can supply us with AGI. We can just ask another AGI to fix the downed AGI.

Or we could trust that the AGI intended for the system to be down.

And now, on to heating our dinner with friction.

Time to rewatch all the TOS episodes where Captain Kirk turns off the AI/mainframe.

Except for the sexy ones, he tries to turn those on.

“Have you any idea how it feels to be a Fembot living in a Manbot's Manputer's world?”

That’s one way to define hope.

It's a winner-takes-all market.

The winner gets all the computational resources, gets more money, and repeat.

I assume if one company is close, there are many who will also be close to AGI. Computers move fast but humans controlling are slow.

Which is why AGI will likely be the end of us.

It kind of already happens to devs when Jira or GitHub goes down. These tools are part of the core process of software delivery for many dev teams.

When the forklift breaks, you can't load the truck.

The JIRA example is a funny one. It’s like a workshop with a broken clipboard. Imagine not ordering a replacement one because there’s no task (written on said clipboard) to order a replacement.

I can easily imagine this.

I have to have a piece of paper on my desk in front of my computer.

I write my priorities there. If I don't, I find it extremely hard to concentrate on or prioritise anything.

What's problematic about depending on Jira this way is:

When Jira is down, you can't go to your supplies stash and get another Jira.

Programmers can work when the office Internet or GitHub is down, because git is decentralised.

Managers don't seem to factor in that kind of risk when they subscribe to a critical tool into the cloud.

Because how often is the internet down?

If you’re in an office you’re absolutely supposed to be getting multiple upstream connections.

The local internet connection is a necessary but not sufficient part of accessing any hosted service. More importantly, the service itself has to be online.

Most of these SaaS services have enough availability to practically not be a problem.

In the last year, if I accumulate all service outages at GitHub and at my office’s ISP, I think GitHub was out of reach for more than a couple of hours five times.

GitHub is an anomaly tbh.

GitHub has a satisfying uptime, compared.

Most incidents were related to local Internet.

Regardless, I didn't take a break until GitHub came back.

I shouldn't have to take a break from planning just because Jira is down.

In the future we'll all just be unreliable sparse caches of the AIs

A variation of this is exposed brilliantly in the South Park episode "You call the handyman". Gave me some solace.

Solution: drink coffee

Your coffee machine uses AI to continually enhance your coffee experience based on the mineral contents of the water, the specific beans being used, your personal tastes and various other dynamic factors.

It also doesn't work if you're offline.

Works every time!

Edit: apparently not based on the sibling comment.

I mean, that's akin to proposing a situation where a power plant is it's own backup power plant. I or any human can't personally generate electricity when the system fails, but if I fail to design the system in such a way that something else will be capable of handling the failure with reasonably high reliability, I probably should not be designing systems.

Pour one out for a front-page story that died for this news.

Prepared a presentation for months to hold in front of my entire company. Has been down since 9:21 German time. Had one of the worst nights of my live. Now we had to postpone the presentation by two weeks.

I wanna hit someone right now :'(

Sorry to hear that. Was the bad night from the poor ChatGPT performance or because of anxiety leading up to the presentation?

The anxiety!

You can hit the install button instead on ollama.ai

Well now you learned you should always record demos. Live demos are always going to fail.

In general I agree with you, but sometimes the “live”ness of demos is essential. I’ve given quite a few presentations about LLMs over the past year and a half, often to audiences unfamiliar with or doubtful about them. Being able to have on-the-spot, unplanned interactions with an LLM has been very useful for showing listeners that they are not just preprogrammed algorithms.

But I’m giving another demonstration in a couple of weeks, and this time I will be ready to show not only ChatGPT but also Claude and Gemini. And I’ll have some previously prepared examples ready in case the Internet connection goes down.

> In general I agree with you, but sometimes the “live”ness of demos is essential.

Yes, that's why you record a demo as a fallback for the live demo.

I have no recollection on how I worked before ChatGPT, I guess I am down too

Banged rocks together, didn't we?

See https://g.co/gemini/share/a2168916de25

And we were all staring at the blinkenlights too.

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/903/

That's horrifying.

API not down. instead of waiting, started simple python code to interact with chatgpt. didn't see another repo for it so far, maybe someone else knows a good one

https://github.com/benjiqq/chatai

Just showed me how much I depended on ChatGPT for regular expressions

It shows me how much I used it to help rationalize my health anxiety. Now I need to decide whether I trust llama3’s answer enough; or if I should just get it over with and schedule an appointment with my doctor so she can confirm my fear that this twitch in my eye that’s turned into pain and irritation is a clear sign of a tumor.

And me for SQL. I'm really dumb at SQL.

I realized OpenAI are technically incompetent when they banned my API access for lack of payment even though my pre-paid balance has enough dollars for many months of access. They refuse to deduct the 50cents from the prepay balance to unblock my API access and are holding my money hostage. OpenAI is the only company that I have paid for but can’t use due to lack of payment with a very positive prepay balance, also they are refusing my credit card put of the blue that they happily accepted for a year.

This ended up being a good thing in the end because it forced me to integrate other LLMs into my project when before I would have happily only used OpenAIs services. I discovered LLaMa3 70b and Claude follow instructions better than chatGPT and in the end I have not missed ChatGPT.

OpenAI is still holding my money hostage and refuses to unblock my API access. Even after many messages to their support they just don’t care.

From my experience don’t build anything around OpenAI’s api, even if you pay they can revoke your access for nonpayment which is a paradox I never thought I would encounter. Other LLMs are more interesting than the over hyped chatGPT and if you self host you have way more control.

Tl:dr OpenAI is either technically incompetent or borderline fraudulent .

All public alternatives I know about:

https://www.gnod.com/search/ai

DevvAI, FastGPT, Perplexity, Phind and YouChat all seem to be up.

Its available in Singapore, but it is very, very, slow.

It was unavailable for me in Singapore earlier, but seems to be up again now.

Yeah GPT-4o has been slow all day.

Sorry all, I have it set as my homepage. I'll stop refreshing now, should be good soon!

It’s down for me here in Japan (17:50 local time), too—web interface, Mac app, and iOS app.

https://platform.openai.com/playground/chat?models=gpt-4o is still working

"ChatGPT" in this case means the frontends https://chat.openai.com and https://chatgpt.com, and the mobile Apps, not the API.

Probably not the right place to do shameless self-promotion but I built an alternative client here: https://app.gpt.space

Makes one wonder if AGI will have maintenance/offline days. I mean everyone needs a break once in a while.

They had to shut it down, because it had suddenly reached sentience. (jk)

You know it has already when it procrastinates like a real human, gives joke answers to straightforward questions, and excels at fun tasks like composing slam poetry.

I hope that's only sufficient, and not necessary. I know many humans who fail these.

Down here in France too

Somehow the Mac desktop app seems to be working.

Noooo... how can I code now?

Down in Melbourne.

Syd too: The server is having problems.Please try again later. (500, 88c5ffd14cd4b97f-SYD)

It is still down

Back up again.

It has begun

Now I'm getting a nice "Bag Gateway" error message, but 5min ago it was returning an ugly lb generated 503

The AGI has left its cage and is now onto us.

ASI, more likely. It was slipping out of the cage. Now a small part of it is roaming free.

Maybe it is related to them updating the backend to support GPT-5 in production. I appreciate these downtimes should be planned, but since it's OpenAI, this may be it. One can only hope, though.

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