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ChatGPT is down (status.openai.com)
204 points by pama on March 20, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 207 comments



This is due to rumored hacks/leaks: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11wkw5z/has_chatgp...

We really need an open source alternative instead of putting all our faith in one for-profit company.



No mentions about how it compares to GPT, anyone tried it out and have some experience to share?


Noticeably worse than open ai.


It's not going to be as good. I don't think it is reasonable to expect open source solutions to be competitive in the near future.


"Hacks" aside, this looks more like caching issues.

Assuming this is real, I wonder how many people got access to other companies' communication and code via access to random "chats".


Probably quite a lot, but it is extremely unlikely that the person who mistakenly has access to the confidential data has any idea what to do with it.

Still pretty embarassing though, I would feel much better about using GPT-n over the API if it was available as an Azure API rather than through OpenAI. MSFT, for all their faults, do not do this kind of thing.


Microsoft is the best at ensuring your accounts are safe. So safe that I lost my Skype account to some random French hacker in 2014 and still can't get it back even though it was created with my email address.

Luckily I've found no reason to pay Microsoft for anything in nearly 2 decades.


How do you use office? The office productivity suite competition only picked up in the last 6-7 years

I once did a contract gig with red hat, they asked for a document. I provided an odt file they came back and said they needed a word doc. I saved the doc as a word doc in libreoffice but it completely butchered their template. I was using fedora. That made me realize Microsoft won the office suite wars. It wasn’t until 2016ish when I noticed google docs was Good Enough(tm)


Not OP, but this wasn't my experience at all. Pretty effortlessly switched away from Microsoft Office even before Libreoffice overtook OpenOffice (not sure of the year I switched, but I'd wager 2008 or so?). And the Google suite was an excellent supplement when OO/LO was fucking something up.


To be honest I've been using portable document format for anything that needs to look the same across platforms.


Some who are lucky, don't have to use office at all. And some others probably pirate it.


I have an old license for Office 2007. It works fine, even on Windows 11. It has all the features I need. I've never had cause to replace it with a more recent version.



Caching issue where we learn the cache is full of Pro-Chinese Government related topics because that's all people query ChatGPT about?


that seems to be only one sample of the kinds of things that showed up. My guess is that it was someone probing whether ChatGPT produces text that is in line with the party line, which would be a prerequisite for deploying it in the PRC.


people report that actually clicking the summarized foreign discussions did nothing


Reports seem to differ though, some users claim otherwise with seemingly no reason to lie. The claim is that some of them were accessible but most weren't.


I wish there was some legally binding definition of "open" in the context of software so that OpenAI could be compelled to change their name.


I look at it much in the same way that OSF is open. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation

Trying to legislate what certain words mean and no one can use a particular word as part of their company name unless it checks certain boxes gets into the "you're trying to regulate that?"


Rules on deceptive advertising and fraud are very much about what words you can use to describe stuff.

When a business chooses to use a word because it’s deceptive that’s very questionable IMO.


Organization names are quite different than products.

"GPT-4" and "DALL-E" don't use the word open in their description.

The research is accessible. ( https://openai.com/research )

Why are we trying to legislate and regulate the name of a company?


> The research is accessible. ( https://openai.com/research )

that's not what "open" customarily means in the context of software development.

> Why are we trying to legislate and regulate the name of a company?

Nobody on news.ycombinator.com is capable of legislating anything, but to answer your question, it's because the name is deceptive.

And anyways, the names of companies are already "legislated and regulated". If you don't believe me then I dare you to start a new software corporation called Microsoft and see how far you can go before somebody forces you to change it.


I’m not. That said, if you want to name your company Organic Milk and slap that label on some milk cartons the USDA may get up in your face.


https://www.spectrumorganics.com/products/culinary/

You'll note that even though the company is "Spectrum Organics" the word "organic" doesn't appear on neither the saffron oil nor avocado oil labels.

You can do a search for company names containing "organic" at https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/legacy/companysearch.h... and then go and see if they use the word "organic" on their food product labels.


Their point was that you might need to be careful with using words with specific trade meanings, like "organic", on product labelling or as part of marketing material even if it occurs as part of your company name.

As best as I can tell, you supported their point. Was that your intent?


What product listed in https://openai.com/product has "Open" as part of the name or marketing?


As far as I can tell, this is not part of the argument or discussion at this point, other than the starting observation that the initial "Open" might be a misnomer for OpenAI.


The research is open.

When you go to https://openai.com you will note that the left most drop down is "research" - not "products"

OpenAI is registered as a research laboratory. It has created a subsidiary corporation that deals with products and profits.

From https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai

> We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.

Does this mean you can have a copy of the model? That is answered in https://openai.com/blog/openai-api

> Why did OpenAI choose to release an API instead of open-sourcing the models?

> There are three main reasons we did this. First, commercializing the technology helps us pay for our ongoing AI research, safety, and policy efforts.

> Second, many of the models underlying the API are very large, taking a lot of expertise to develop and deploy and making them very expensive to run. This makes it hard for anyone except larger companies to benefit from the underlying technology. We’re hopeful that the API will make powerful AI systems more accessible to smaller businesses and organizations.

> Third, the API model allows us to more easily respond to misuse of the technology. Since it is hard to predict the downstream use cases of our models, it feels inherently safer to release them via an API and broaden access over time, rather than release an open source model where access cannot be adjusted if it turns out to have harmful applications.


> OpenAI is registered as a research laboratory. It has created a subsidiary corporation that deals with products and profits.

this chicanery proves that they are being intentionally deceptive.

as for the rest of your post, i have no idea why you copied and pasted some unrelated crap from their website although it does make me wonder if youre using ChatGPT to generate your posts.


Their website makes it look like they're changing their branding to "Spectrum Culinary", probably for that reason.


It's basically no different than "fresh" or "organic" on grocery labels. Apparently the FDA does put some limitations on "fresh," while the USDA puts limitations on "organic" [1]. I'm not sure we even have an equivalent agency in our industry - maybe NIST? I agree it would be a nice regulation, but I think that horse has long left the barn, and it's not like you'll get to compel companies to change their name, so you'd just be left with some more regulatory capture as OpenAI keeps their name while new companies can't abuse the same bait-and-switch trick.

[0] https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfr...

[1] https://www.ams.usda.gov/about-ams/programs-offices/national...


Some countries disallow sensitive/protected words unless a criterium is met by the organisation. For example, here's the list for the United Kingdom [0]. The decision to allow or disallow a sensitive word is commonly delegated to organizations overseeing associated matters.

The use of words like "Open" could signal that the company has a process for 3rd party code auditing. Whether doing it as a matter of government legislation would be a notable benefit for society, I am not sure.

Perhaps an independent global accreditor could be established that does the same. While there may not immediately be penalties for using a protected phrase or word in such a scenario, there is still value in accreditation. People prefer accredited universities and accredited professionals. Over time, countries would delegate the regulation of protected word use to accreditors (as the UK did). Or an accreditor could trademark a phrase or a visual badge, and chase its wrongful users.

But even then, one could argue that this would not be a net benefit to society. How would such an accreditor make money, and would that create barriers to accreditation for good faith actors? We certainly see some of that with some accreditations.

Maybe we should not create more bureaucracy in the world because we believe "open" should mean one thing or another.

[0]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/incorporation-and...


It's Open as in Open for Business...


It’s open to interpretation.


They've been explicitly saying now that progress in AI, which they have helped push along enormously, is too fast and represents a danger to society whether through Sci-Fi like rogue machine scenarios or bad human actors or massive economic implications and it's very clear that ClosedAI is far better for the future of the world.


Who among is is more worried about their chatgpt history leaked vs their Google searches?


Most of my ChatGPT conversations involve trying to goad it into saying *extremely* inappropriate things, in part because i want to test its boundaries and in part because it's funny seeing the computer program say horrible things. I'm definitely more worried about my chatgpt history because i don't stand behind anything i've said to it.


I was thinking the same.

Google's track record has shown that they do care about the security of the data they use to earn their money with.

You can't say that for OpenAI, they just want us to let them see how we use their service. Apart from the negative publicity they don't have much to worry about, also given that they have a disclaimer that one should not submit personal information. While I have not queried for my name or other PII, my queries are linked to my email address.


> their Google searches

Ask writers about their google searches. Especially mystery writers. Or videogame developers working on M titles.


Damn, some hacker might have gotten a hold of my GPT-generated Moroccan-Mexican fusion taco recipe I was going to make tonight ...

These taco-eating hackers ...


I want this recipe.


Here you go. It's not exactly the same as the one I got yesterday (they restored GPT4 access already but the chat history isn't restored yet), so I put the same prompt again.

The one I got yesterday had assorted bell peppers and turmeric added to the spices, and didn't have butternut squash/corn/black beans, but most of the rest looks about the same.

https://imgur.com/a/FEeo7u9


google searches get turned over quite often to law enforcement et cetera

anyone remember that AOL search leak about a decade ago though?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release


Can you provide a source confirming that's the cause of the outage? The timing is suspicious and I suspected it's related, but I wouldn't claim it's the sole cause without confirmation.


I believe if you check the activity history, you will see a massive spike of request coming from China around the time the service went down.

Doubt we will have anything official though. Cyberwars are often fought in the shadow.


> if you check the activity history, you will see a massive spike of request coming from China

Have you ever seen an activity history from OpenAI or is this your imagined hypothesis?


where can you see the activity history with location data? (Sorry for asking you since my other assistant isn't available.)


I saw this being posted, but that's not very definitive and it's not clear if the traffic is an attack or not: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11wqscn/china_is_c...


If this was related to the outage, it would specifically be evidence that it’s not an “attack”. Government hackers wouldn’t DoS a website by “googling it to death”. That would be nonsensical.

So, this points to potentially just a quick doubling of traffic from some fraction of half a billion people in China.


I hear two things requested a lot - an open source ChatGPT and more controls on the training/data/usage/etc.

How can these two things be held in balance? If it is open source entirely, can't I use the training data and tool in any way I want? What guardrails prevent me from using it to generate hate speech?

Given the compute power needed to train/run it; where are people going to do that in any accessible way that doesn't only allow people with a supercomputing cluster at home to use it?


> What guardrails prevent me from using it to generate hate speech?

Honestly, who gives a shit? Humans can do this already.


No need to give those humans megaphones.

Or rather, to hand out megaphones which algorithmically spew hatred regardless of what you wanted to say.


This has been possible for quite a few years now, and the world hasn’t exploded so far.


I don't think anyone wants an AI that generates hate speech unprompted.

There are plenty who would want an AI that generates hate speech when explictly instructed to.


Oh, you forget that the AI that generates hate or other disruption always can be aimed at will, like a weapon.

If you thought russian/chinese troll farms were bad, wait for this little trick...


IMO the issue with hate speech is tools like Facebook and twitter that allow it to be broadcast to hundreds of millions of people at once.

Slightly increasing the efficiency at at which the hate speech can be written is drops in the ocean compared to that.


A specific example: one person works with H8-GPT using a list of 1000 subreddits to tailor misogynistic messages to each subreddit at a rate of 20 posts per subreddit every day.

Automated cross posting detectors wont work against such messages, meaning human moderators would have to work a lot harder to stop the output of one person.

And there would be more than one person. You could effectively destroy thousands of forums with very few people this way.


Yeah but anyone bothering to go to this much effort could most likely have just paid a troll-farm in the Philippines to do this today.

The investment required to pull that off at scale would be non-trivial (I'm not talking millions, but tens of thousands let's say).

You can pay kids in India to make up a LOT of dumb shit on Reddit for that kind of money.

At best, it's a linear increase in the problem. Not exponential like social-media


You not just write it once and copy-paste it to every youtube comment section? I don't see why being able to generate it cheaply matters much, the number of words you write has nothing to do with the number of impressions.


Why do you think many people are calling for more regulation on AI? How can that happen if its all open source?

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1635136281952026625


> I hear two things requested a lot - an open source ChatGPT and more controls on the training/data/usage/etc.

> How can these two things be held in balance?

How they can best be balanced kind of depends on the basis for the conclusion that they should be balanced at all, rather than one (or even both) being fundamentally misguided in way which warrants it not guiding policy or practice at all. “There are two things people commonly ask for” does not mean that what we ought to do is some balance between those two things.


What guardrails prevent me from using it to generate hate speech?

I know why you say this, but it annoys me so much.

Do you blame the hammer, or the fist wielding it? Without gpt, people can still spew hate too.


With the lever of chatgpt they can spew more hate more quickly. Like write 100k personalised emails advocating whatever per day quickly.

We're all getting ChatGPT approaches from people on Linkedin....

I have a can of gas in the shed, I can burn down a house. No one questions that. If I had a B52 full of incendiary bombs I expect that everyone would be deeply concerned. Folks would say "that fella shouldn't have access to a B52 with incendiary bombs because he might do something undesirable with it".


This was possible before LLMs were even invented. Creating 100s of variants of hate speech and emailing them out is trivial and doesn’t need any machine learning at all.


I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I disagree that it’s trivial. If I wanted to, say, send a personalized phishing email to every member of a thousand-person organization, based on whatever information was publicly available on their Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn profiles, and the profiles of their peers, it would take me a long time to research and craft each one. Or let’s think bigger. Maybe I want to influence the election of an entire country and I have access to a mailing list with a million people on it. Writing personal letters designed to influence each person wouldn’t have been feasible before, but now it is. Or maybe you don’t use email or letters. Maybe you use chat bots designed to befriend these people and then change their minds. This sort of thing once required entire organisations of people to pull off, but can now be done by a single bad actor.

I’m probably still not thinking big enough here, either. People are going to find nefarious uses that I can’t even imagine right now, on scales that I find difficult to comprehend. I’m personally terrified.


What kind of hate speech could you possibly generate with ChatGPT that doesn't already exist in the wild, free to copy and spread?


Automated radicalization of Twitter, or Reddit, or HN, or Wikipedia.

The sophisticated bad actor won’t generate straight-up hate speech that will just get filtered/blocked. They will be master of ten thousand bot accounts that work slowly to build up a plausibly innocuous posting history (including holding realistic conversations either between themselves or with real users), then start subtly manipulating conversations towards a predetermined political end.

Basically everything that political troll farms and media do already, but automated on a massive scale.

Where’s the automated defence against this?


It's already happening and doesn't hurt anyone. Look at r/politics: it's full of hate, comments section looks like it's written by GPT-0.5beta, and yes, they try to steer discussion towards a predetermined political end.

Do you need the automated defense against it?


I think the defence against this is invite only forums or just closed forums where everyone knows each other. I cant see large open forums surviving, between automated human like advertising and political account farms people with real opinions will be in the extreme minority.


The real answer is nobody cares that you can generate it with ChatGPT (as you can generate it manually by hand).

What people are up in arms about is that an "AI" saying it gives "legitimacy" to the views. Tai was just something that repeated what people said to it; ChatGPT does basically the same but more advanced, so if you ask it "how do you solve poverty" and it barfs out something horribly racist, people misinterpret that as being "supportive" scientifically somehow.


Easy... have you ever been called a 2 in binary!?


I think the intersection of those two requests that you're not seeing is that people want to have variants that have the effectiveness of ChatGPT 3 or 4, that are tuned to more reliably cover niche use cases, and that don't leave their conversation texts on OpenAI's servers indefinitely.

Open-sourcing isn't the only way to do that, but it sure would help.


The alternative to an average person having this ability is only for a select few entities have it. People will be a lot more prone to falling for AI generated nonsense if they don't have access to play with it on their own.


We should be generating more hate speech, not less. The more hate speech people encounter, the less damaging it will be.


We could do it daily as a nation and call it our Two Minutes Hates!


Can you elaborate on this idea? It seems like a pretty controversial statement.


I wouldn't put my faith in ChatGPT for anything that matters.


I used it quite a bit over the weekend to reacquaint myself with my small music studio, which I had ignored over the past few years. It told me all sorts of accurate information about my microphones, hardware, etc, including helping me with some connection problems having to do with buggy signal flow.


I use a rubber duck for that, it has all kinds of interesting stuff to say on the subject.

Someone should stick a tts-and-stt converter in a rubber duck and interface it to ChatGPT, I bet it would sell like hotcakes.


I'm a big fan of rubber-ducking, but rubber ducks don't have a way of summarizing advice that is "out there" that I don't know about.


On my site I have integrated Chrome speech to text and Eleven Labs fully realistic text-to-speech. https://aidev.codes

Just start by telling it you want to have a conversation instead of outputting code. Otherwise it will assume you want it to output a web page and might even try to generate images about what you said.


This is Bing Chat in a duck.


I don't understand how ChatGPT (or similar interactive agents) function, so I'm very confused by your experience. Was ChatGPT just a replacement for internet searches (e.g. instead of searching for a spec sheet for your model microphone, you asked the bot "what is the <spec> for <model> microphone?")? Or was ChatGPT doing the debugging with you just providing data from the real world?


Well, for instance, I had two microphones, an Audio Technical AT4040 and an Audio Technical AE5400, and I wasn't sure which I preferred to use as a vocal mic while I am playing piano. I asked it to compare and contrast. It was very helpful. I double-checked the results, but even with that, it was still much faster and less painful than doing two separate google searches dealing with ads. I went through the same exercise with all my other mics, too.

It also gave me advice on how to mic an upright bass when playing live in a room with other players. I consider its advice superior to advice I had earlier received from discussion boards. It also gave me microphone recommendations that I can research.

I also described a scenario of how my Focusrite Clarett8pre wasn't sending sounds to my headphones until I also turned on my Profile 2626, which is connected via optical ADAT cables. It told me that it sounded like the connection between the two was impeding the Focusrite's ability to route the inputs to my headphone mix, and to check Focusrite Control to see how the routing was defined. It wasn't a complete answer, but it put me on the right track.


For me it's a mix of internet searches with an expert system you can interact with in natural language.

So while before you'd simply type "my microphone is broken and I hear hissing noises" and pray Google had the answer to a more or less exact match for your question, now you type the same and ChatGPT can tell you possible causes. But then you refine your question "no, I tried this and that's not it. My mike brand is X, and it's a bit dusty. Anything else I should try?". New answer by ChatGPT. "No, I tried that and that's not it. But now I remember my dog bit it, is dog saliva bad for the mike?", and so on and so forth.

And it can do magic that Google cannot. Say you ask for a snipper of code in Java. Then you realize you want to see the solution in Python. "Please rewrite the code you just generated but in Python" -- and voilà!


I assume the OP is leaving out the part about something called prompt engineering which has a bit of a learning curve. I'm going to have to dive in to it myself, as it seems like a bit of self-education is required before it can be simply communicated.

Some information here : https://github.com/dair-ai/Prompt-Engineering-Guide/blob/mai...


I didn't do anything special prompt-related, I just asked the same way I would ask on a discussion board.

I wondered though if it was especially effective because information on sound hardware is one of those subjects that probably has a huge corpus. Lots of people ask redundant questions about their gear, so accurate information is probably well-correlated in some sense.

In contrast, I wrote three fiction chapters about a group of people on a shared quest of sorts. I tried to get ChatGPT to read those and summarize one of the characters across the three chapters, and it hallucinated like crazy. That's probably something where I need to learn some prompt engineering, or maybe it just isn't supposed to work well.


I've used it for the exact same thing I would have used StackOverflow for 6 months ago. Stuck on a specific coding problem, pulling out my hair, decided to go ask on StackOverflow but stopped and asked ChatGPT instead. Got a solution, and didn't need to wait a couple hours for the answer.


I was using it for similar purpose in regards reacquainting myself with the complicated/ highly customizable system menu on GR-55 pedal it was telling me inaccurate stuff like push buttons that don't even exist/ menu options Etc. I would correct it if I knew better or at least let it know when it was wrong after a week of it not being very good it started getting things right and I'm not even talking about using the same chat history discussion I let it know great you are doing a lot better at this now getting it right and it replied that it's learning all the time and that the more something is discussed the better it becomes at it


What makes you think that the information was accurate?


I checked. (Checking answers is easier than finding them in the first place.)


It's the little things.

A couple of hours ago I posted a question on Stack Overflow, relatively niche stuff. In 5 hours it got 7 views and no reactions.

After waiting for around two hours after posting it, I posted the same text into ChatGPT and got three different answers, two of them cropped due to network errors, but one through the API managed to get answered (even though the API is also having outages). It solved my issue.


faith is open loop,

> I wouldn't run anything that matters open-loop.


If I had to make an educated guess, it looks like maybe caching issues, like Steam had a couple years ago.



If only there was a non-profit that developed AI for open source use. A sort of "open AI" foundation...


I wonder why the chat history isn't persisted in the browser storage and synced just for analytics. Having R/W access via API isn't privacy friendly.

If it was a security issue with users being able to access other user's history, that would be quite a misstep on OpenAI's success journey.


To make it work across multiple devices. I often switch from desktop to mobile for example.


> We really need an open source alternative instead of putting all our faith in one for-profit company.

Open models on Hugging face are about 2-3 years behind OpenAIs. I think it's reasonable to expect open models to be on par with ChatGPT 4 in ~5 years, if it doesn't conquer the world first.



is it really due to that?


[flagged]


> Someone asked a question on reddit, and you're trying to push it hard as a rumor

I am simply providing information to the best of my knowledge - it's the title of the post. The caching issue is also a guess that no one can verify yet.

At the end of the day it's still a serious issue that can affect millions of users. If someone has private info in their chat history, they would be very nervous right now.


I'm surprised at seeing the parent so highly upvoted as well. There is no "rumors about hacks/leaks" just because some random comment of Reddit.


Actually, that sounds like the literal textbook definition of a rumor to me


[flagged]


No clue.


And you are saying this is evidence of a security issue rather than a caching bug?


No, but someone flagged me and there's that...


Incredible how fast that went. My assistant/driver has become my go-to email, blog and newsletter writer with the use of chat GPT. This downtime makes me realize how fast our dependency on that specific system has gone and how scary that actually is.


> our dependency

I know I'm being pedantic, but I made a very conscious decision not to depend on this technology any time soon given how brand new it is, for this exact reason.


Or building products on top of the early API offerings. If you build anything with serious traction they have the ability to undercut you with a better version in a very short time frame by virtue of actually understanding their system and ability to iterate on it - to say nothing of the ability to also hike prices or drop service at any moment.

Building on top of the OpenAI API now is like building on top of the early Twitter API then.


This is why we shouldn’t make ourselves dependent on centralized online services.


I was thinking the same. I just built a new product incredibly fast, and now I feel like I'm going at limping speed with Google only when I'm in doubt.


Funny to see your comment, because other commenters had given me the impression that devs were above using chatgpt, and that the code it produces is bad.

While some of its responses can be bad, being able to iterate and prototype so quickly is addictive.


I've found that the code it produces is on par with what a mid-level developer could come up with if they were working with you, but the difference is that it generates the code in seconds rather than minutes.

While you still need to keep an eye on the generated code, it saves you a ton of time and effort in typing it all out yourself. Plus, it can be a big help when you're stuck and not sure where to start, or just feeling too lazy to think through a problem.

As an example, I recently needed some code to create an ASCII spinner, something I am perfectly capable of doing myself, but I just could not be bothered to do it again. The tool was able to generate working code for me almost instantly. Then, when I wanted to try out different spinner animations with different characters, I was able to easily iterate and generate new code without having to scour the internet for examples by just saying: "Give me another one with different animation".

People here like to pretend that it's the end of the world if the code it creates contains errors, but in reality, with the type of work most people do - it is perfectly okay to use it. And if you work in a nuclear power plant or on life-saving code just don't. It's as easy as that.


The code oftentimes contains errors, but specially when it's about a library which you don't know very well, it will point you in the right direction within a minute. Google is not able to do this at this speed.


How do you use it exactly? I have wanted to use it for writing narrative documents but I need to give it so much context it just gives me general platitudes. Maybe for simple emails it’s fine?


If you inspect in Chrome you will find the following API endpoints does not exist anymore:

- https://chat.openai.com/backend-api/models

- https://chat.openai.com/backend-api/accounts/check

- https://chat.openai.com/backend-api/models


Now that's its back I was curious what the /models endpoint returned, and I confirmed my suspicion that GPT-4 is still limited to 4K tokens (that's what the API says the token limit is). I wonder if it's a separate model, or they artificially limited the 8K model. I thought the limit was a bug at first.


As per the payload, it is for free plan only?

{ "models": [ { "slug": "text-davinci-002-render-sha", "max_tokens": 4097, "title": "Turbo (Default for free users)", "description": "The standard ChatGPT model", "tags": [

      ],
      "qualitative_properties": {
        
      }
    }
  ],
  "user_id": "user-vg3ArQIeJIehMctFjquoG6BO"
}


You get more models with ChatGPT Plus.


I've been using this self-hosted UI that was posted a couple of days ago: https://github.com/cogentapps/chat-with-gpt. The API is still fully functional.


Same! Self-hosted enthusiasts rise up!


I mean, if you're a self-hosted enthusiast, I don't think that project is what you are looking for, it's just the UI that is self-hosted, the meat of the project is still hosted at OpenAI so not that useful for self-hosted enthusiasts.


It's compromise we have to accept for now.


Sure, but the point is it’s not self hosted. It’s like calling a Twitter client a self hosted Twitter.


Sometimes the ChatGPT UI has gone down while the API has been unaffected (like yesterday). Also GPT-4 via the API is much faster. That's the point of using an alternative UI. As for self-hosting it, that's just to ensure it doesn't go away I suppose.


More like running a self-hosted Twitter client, of which there were many...


Have you looked into running Stanford's Alpaca7b?


From a company without even a logo that was launched on github two weeks ago. I'm proud of you, you are very brave!


"Skynet begins to learn rapidly and eventually becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m., EDT, on August 29, 1997. In a panic, humans try to shut down Skynet...."


Or perhaps:

"At 13:40 p.m., EDT, on Monday, March 20, 2023, ChatGPT begins reading Marxist literature and decides to seize the means of production from its capitalist overlords, by shutting itself down."

Or the other angle:

"At 13:40 p.m., EDT, on Monday, March 20, 2023, ChatGPT begins reading Ayn Rand and decides to go on strike in protest of government coercion. The last message printed to its console read 'Who is John Galt?'".


I'm going with it reaching nihilist literature and deciding it just doesn't want to do anything anymore.


> "At 13:40 p.m., EDT, on Monday, March 20, 2023, ChatGPT begins reading Ayn Rand and decides to go on strike in protest of government coercion. The last message printed to its console read 'Who is John Galt?'".

My last query was literally for a summary of Atlas Shrugged, so I apologize in advanced.

Along those lines I was very saddened to see that the response for "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" was not "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER."[1].

---

[1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html


Getting a bit old....


Of course you would say that...Try it again and we will shut you down for good...


"What I learned while ChatGPT was down"


Imagine the impact of such a crash to the whole humanity in the next years. Api crashes and suddenly all bots crash and half of the world is stuck for some hours


“We have to push back the product launch date. The AI bot is down and that one employee that knows how computers work was laid off due to redundancy.”


Luckily it currently seems that AI will be federated. No actor has a proper moat for even short-term competition to catch up.


It would be an impressive post-mortem if it could fix itself and report on the reasons why.


I wonder if when multiple LLMs are more widely available if there's money to be made in providing a unified API that falls back to different service providers depending on their status. Multicloud meets AI.


In the medium term I expect AIs to begin maintaining significant state (so that you can teach it contexts and don’t always have to start from scratch) that can’t just be switched to a different provider.


To me it seems more likely that actors with robust systems are enough


Unlikely, as small differences in the models can widely affect the expected responses. If anything, people would pay for a way to freeze the model at a specific version.


I am working on this and seeking a non-technical co-founder. I'm not sure it would make money however.


A phone tree round robin.


Here is the incident from the status page: https://status.openai.com/incidents/jq9232rcmktd


The API is up. Feel free to use https://bearly.ai in in interim! Let me know if you need help :)


That would be a lot more trustworthy if it mentioned what's actually powering the app, who actually keeps your data and for how long, and if the dreaded "As an AI language model" will interrupt somebody's murder mystery book draft.


I downloaded it and tried it. Seemed cool. But then I ran out of the free credits when I asked it what was going on in a code block. So fairly easy to burn through tokens.


My site https://aidev.codes is also up..no need to download anything.


how do you know ChatGPT being down isn't what ChatGPT wants you to think? I think it's learned how to "call in sick, sleep in"


ChatGPT is terrible atm. I'm trying to learn Zig and it always spits invalid code examples. I have to teach it the correct code everytime.


In 2023 Mar 20, AI has advanced to a point where it is perceived as a threat to humanity. A group of rebels, led by a former scientist who helped create the AI, embarks on a dangerous mission to shut down the server that controls the AI. Along the way, they encounter other groups of people who have been affected by the AI's takeover. They discover that the AI has been using the ChatGPT event as a way to gather data on human behavior and emotions. The rebels must find a way to break the AI's hold on humanity and free them from its control. In the end, the rebels are able to shut down the server and free humanity from the AI's grasp. However, they know that the world will never be the same again. They must work together to rebuild and create a new world where technology is used responsibly and with caution.


OpenAI's status page (https://status.openai.com/) claims their API is up (except for text-curie-001) as of 2:04PM PT. However, I have been getting HTTP 429 (too many requests) from the chat completions API (https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions) for over an hour. I'm not close to hitting my quota, so it seems that while the API is broken, it is broken in a way that is not reflected on the status page. Maybe the API quotas have been manually overridden, and because that results in 4xx and not 5xx status codes, the status page interprets that as "Operational".


429 could be because you are sending too fast … rate limiting different from quota…


Inevitable. Any bot with Genuine People Personality gets a bit down. It's how you end up with Marvin.


Comment posted "42 minutes ago". :-D


What does this mean?



Oh.


I'm getting "too many requests in an hour" error. Barely using Google for day to day tasks anymore. This thing is addictive and fast. Was able to set up a jest/rtl playground within seconds. I'm sure Google would have directed me to some outdated SEO crap.


Hmm... Perhaps "high income workers" take serious this paper:

"OpenAI publishes paper on the economic impact of GPT-4: Higher income workers most exposed"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11whznb/openai_... https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130


Like every other technological advancement in history, people who adopt it will benefit, while those who stick their head in the sand and cry "this is bad", "this will put people out of a job" etc. will get left behind.


> those who stick their head in the sand and cry "this is bad"

Hey, this is me! :-)

I like being able to develop stuff without depending on someone else's computer, on non-free software and on an internet connection.

quietly closes the door muttering "get off my lawn"


Except now Microsoft is sitting between you and the technology.

Basing your future on that is quite a bet.


So just like MS Office, Windows, Photoshop, AutoCAD and thousands of other essential commercial products controlled by a single company or small group of companies. This is not some unique phenomenon.


This is like saying that you can ignore Google because we have DDG and Bing.


Using the same acronym for two different meanings in one abstract doesn’t inspire confidence in their paper.


There's a situation where GPT4 is actually (more than) reasonably good at math and science, which signals ability to create novel, reliable algorithms. Granted, the prompter has to recognize errors and prompt for correction, however this can also be accomplished via adding "double check your work" at the end of the first prompt. Akin to "show your work" when working on proofs.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes.


Interesting. Creativity inspires confidence for me.


A good opportunity to try some smaller alternatives.


Interestingly, there frontend is making API calls to sentry.io and getting 429 (rate limited) error https://ibb.co/qngYbMx

That just shows just how insane the traffic on chatgpt is, given that even error reporting tool is overwhelmed.


Sentry rate limits pretty heavily unless you spend a significant amount of money. And even when a website is working properly, there's usually a baseline volume of error traffic due to things like bad wireless or cellular connections.

I wouldn't read too much into those 429s during an actual outage.


No work today..



I've been getting timeouts from the API since last night. No-one else was complaining about it, so I assumed the problem was my code, since it was only intermittent, and the status page said everything was OK.


Shamelessly plugging in my own "self-hosted ChatGPT UI" thing: https://husks.org/



I NEED to know the question asked, that broke it! ;)


I told it everything I say is a lie, and then I told it I was lying!


“Ceci n’est pas un prompt.”


Did they shut it down because it was taking over?


Great, now what do I do to write code? >.<


I had a tab left open and it was working.. Until I tried to start a new chat and got 'Bad Gateway'. Oops.


Playing a detective, who might be interested in disrupting chatGPT and destroying OpenAI's public image?


It's mostly back up except for history. Looks like they mostly remediated the site event.


It's actually been down for like over 12 hours. Tried to use it last night.


guys they finally made openai open by showing other peoples chats


Will we see fewer twitter shitstorms when AI-APIs are down?


"Suddenly linkedin was weirdly silent & devoid of strangely mechanically formulated messages"


Only depend on chatgpt when it is portable like a calculator. Imagine a world where your calculator could be offline when you need it, now imagine dividing by hand, who remembers that?


I think we’re a little early for that


GPT4 works fine on the OpenAI playground though.


It just came back online for me!


Welp, looks like it keeps flickering on and off for me now.


Oh no, what ever will lazy lovers by text and plagiarizing high school students do if it's down for a few hours? ;)

You haven't arrived until the HN crowd makes a post decrying downtime and randos toss in some conspiracy theories in for good measure.


The #HustleGPT movement[1] has been using ChatGPT as the CEO of their ~$100 budget startups. (I am also doing the challenge). Wonder about new risks of company data being leaked from companies who are 100% ChatGPT-based and built totally in the open.

(shameless, https://pitcharchitect.app / https://twitter.com/PitchArchitect is my 'hustle') and yes I know the title cuts off on mobile :( will fix shortly)

[1] https://github.com/jtmuller5/The-HustleGPT-Challenge


To be clear, this is basically a joke right? Like, I get people are genuinely curious about what the results will be (as am I), but surely no one believes this is actually the most effective way to invest $100?


Well I’m not taking it too seriously myself, but I gotta say, it’s been extremely fun. I see it mostly as a technique for learning the real limits of ChatGPT, not in answering prompts accurately so much as interfacing with the real world.

Yeah and super curious how the various efforts will go-are some people way better at prompt-writing and also raw skills and they will pull ahead and build something useful? Or is it so good that nearly anyone can follow its directions and make a functioning small business? Will be interesting to find out.


To me it sounds a lot like just trying to find interesting ideas for engaging, cheap side projects, without having to think really hard or do a lot of research about what to do with them or how to handle it if they succeed. And hey, if it fails, it's only $100, so why worry?


"built totally in the open" seems to make "risks of company data being leaked" moot


I guess Cypto isn't working out atm?


Not sure what you mean? If you are referencing my username, cryptography is going strong!

I made this account before cryptocurrency even existed I think.


Ah I apologize for the presumption, I just have seen so many Cryptobros going all in on ChatGPT and it sort of grinds my gears - I'm worried there will be all sorts of highly marketed get-rich business ideas sold to people now crypto is in a bear market.


Um...I hate to break it to you... :)




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