Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Major outages across ChatGPT and API

status.openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 617 posts

Re: Major outages across ChatGPT and API

#501

Post by EMM_386 »

leetharris wrote: post #160
harveywi wrote: post #57

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

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. I had a bug that wouldn't let me login to my work OpenAI account at my new job 9 months ago. It took them 6 months to respond to my support request and they gave me a generic copy/paste answer that had nothing to do with my problem. We spend tons and to…

> 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.

Re: Major outages across ChatGPT and API

#502

Post by nazgul17 »

glitchcrab wrote: post #499
Alupis wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think ChatGPT isn't also returning false and/or misleading info? Maybe you just haven't noticed... Personally, I struggle with anything even slightly technical from all of the current LLM's. You really have to know enough about the topic to detect BS when you see it... which is a significant problem for those using it as a learning tool.

This is my problem with chatgpt and why I won't use it; I've seen it confidently return incorrect information enough times that I just cannot trust it.

The version with search will give you links to the references it bases its answers on.

Re: Major outages across ChatGPT and API

#503

Post by dgacmu »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #455
wfhBrian wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People constantly recommend Bard to me, but it returns false and/or misleading info almost every time

I had the opposite experience. I was trying to figure out what this weird lightbulb was that I had to replace, and it had no writing on it. I uploaded the description and picture to gpt4, and it just got it clearly wrong over and over. Tried bard, got it right in the first try, with links to the product. I was extremely impressed.

I had a similar experience with Google lens recently. I've gotten used to Yandex image search being better than Google's for many searches, but I needed to figure out what model of faucet I had on my sink, and Google nailed it. My hunch is that because of all the work they did on Google shopping gathering labeled product images and things like that, they have an excellent internal data set when it comes to things like your light bulb and my sink.

Re: Major outages across ChatGPT and API

#504

Post by kccqzy »

satvikpendem wrote: post #467
_dark_matter_ wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the opposite experience. I was trying to figure out what this weird lightbulb was that I had to replace, and it had no writing on it. I uploaded the description and picture to gpt4, and it just got it clearly wrong over and over. Tried bard, got it right in the first try, with links to the product. I was extremely impressed.

The vast knowledge trove of Google can't be understated, even if sometimes the model isn't as competent at certain tasks as OpenAI's GPT models.

Isn't there just a comment today on HN saying Google had an institutional reluctance to use certain data sets like libgen? I honestly don't think Google used everything they had to train their LLM.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38194107

Re: Major outages across ChatGPT and API

#505

Post by kccqzy »

willsmith72 wrote: post #495
Filligree wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT was down, so of course it'd be slower. And possibly that accounts for some quality loss as well. For a fair comparison, you probably need to try while ChatGPT is working.

> ChatGPT was down, so of course it'd be slower Actually at Google scale I wouldn't expect so

Yeah but Google missed the boat when it came to hardware accelerators specifically meant for LLMs (their proprietary TPUs aren't optimized for LLMs) so it's just a matter of whether Google or Microsoft paid Nvidia more. In the current cost cutting climate at Google I doubt the answer is so certain.

Re: Major outages across ChatGPT and API

#506

Post by Alupis »

nazgul17 wrote: post #502
glitchcrab wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my problem with chatgpt and why I won't use it; I've seen it confidently return incorrect information enough times that I just cannot trust it.

The version with search will give you links to the references it bases its answers on.

You still have to go read the references and comprehend the material to determine if the GPT answer was correct or not.

I don't know the name for the effect, but it's similar to when you listen/watch the news. When the news is about a topic you know an awful lot about, it's plainly obvious how wrong they are. Yet... when you know little about the topic, you just trust what you hear even though they're as likely to be wrong about that topic as well.

The problem is people (myself included) try to use GPT as a guided research/learning tool, but it's filled with constant BS. When you don't know much about the topic, you're not going to understand what is BS and what is not.

Re: Major outages across ChatGPT and API

#507

Post by vouaobrasil »

nearbuy wrote: post #412
vouaobrasil wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically, you are happy to use AI because it benefits you and you are also happy training it to replace other people since you will not be the one replaced.

We don't have to be happy about it, but we can't stop this new technology any more than we could stop the invention of the steam engine or the printing press. Technology always displaces jobs; that's largely the point of inventing it. By reducing the human labour required to produce something, it allows us to produce more using fewer resources and frees up the labour to go work on something else. This is why we went…

I disagree. Not using ChatGPT can be the start of a coalition of people that do not use it. I already have two principles: (1) to not use generative AI, LLMs and other AI tooks, and (2) to give preference to people and businesses who do the same. It's simple. If I find that websites use ChatGPT to help generate their content, I stop visiting and supporting them. If I find businesses using AI, I stop supporting them. I already got one other self-sustaining business to at least pubicly declare not to use generative AI and in my personal business, I do so as well.

If such a coalition grows large enough, then AI tools can be extinguished or at least made sufficiently prohibitively expensive so that they are strangled.

Re: Major outages across ChatGPT and API

#508

Post by broast »

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #476
notfed wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost certainly just delegating to Google Lens, which indeed works great. Bard's probably just a middle man here.

I would think that ChatGPT is also delegating to some other subsystem.

Right, a glance at the new Assistant API docs, which seems to mirror ChatGPT in functionality, suggests that the "Assistant" determines which tool to use, or which models to use (code or chat) to generate a response message. The API is limited in that it can't use Vision or generate images, but I imagine that those are just "Tools" too that the assistant has access to.

Re: Major outages across ChatGPT and API

#510

Post by jfoster »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #455
wfhBrian wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People constantly recommend Bard to me, but it returns false and/or misleading info almost every time

I had the opposite experience. I was trying to figure out what this weird lightbulb was that I had to replace, and it had no writing on it. I uploaded the description and picture to gpt4, and it just got it clearly wrong over and over. Tried bard, got it right in the first try, with links to the product. I was extremely impressed.

I asked Bard the question "Who is Elon Musk?"

The response: "I'm a text-based AI, and that is outside of my capabilities."

Post reply on HN