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The OpenAI API is currently down.

Also, the uptime graph for November doesn't look so great: https://status.openai.com/uptime

[Edit] Probably a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38371169 but I linked directly to the incident page so it didn't show up as a dupe.

I imagine it’s from a spike in traffic after dev day
or maybe the load of audio inbound/outbound from opening voice to all users
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Understatement of the year candidate here.
"We're experiencing exceptionally high demand. Please hang tight as we work on scaling our systems."

losing a CEO is certainly a scaling problem.

When I try to ask a question I get "There is a problem with your request" with a case/error number that I'm not sure if I should post or not, while using the Android mobile app.
I've been logged out of the app, and I get an error when I try to sign back in.

On the web, I now see "ChatGPT Alpha," with an "Alpha models" dropdown ("Default" is the only option). Trying to chat with it fails with a generic error message as well. What does it all mean?

was just mostly dead, but now dead dead
Likely connected to the fact that they released voice chat for free users an hour ago. https://x.com/openai/status/1727065166188274145

Assuming these two things are related, if I may editorialize just a tiny bit, I am a little annoyed at how much their rollouts often disrupt service for paying customers. Paid users being impacted by free user rushes really sucks, but is understandable. API developers being impacted by free-user rollouts is unacceptable, and especially sucks for those who have to answer to users of their own.

I suppose this is a wakeup call to migrate to Microsoft's Azure endpoints which, presumably, aren't affected by the current outages. But I'm fully tapped out in terms of yet another service's application and vetting process.

So to connecting it back to the current drama, while I support OpenAI, their employees, and Sam's return, I can understand why folks like Helen would be miffed by management's approach to building. I'm not saying they should slow product development, but would staged rollouts hurt?

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I prefer the Pi app's voice chat ... it has a lot more personality and will play along with questions like whose your spirit animal: Mother Teresa or Obama. It will provide an answer there yet when you ask it the same question using Trump and Hitler it refuses to answer lol

Overall Chat GPT's voice chat needs some zing to it when compared to Pi. Yet either both are awesome pieces of technology, just prefer one over the other. Pi is free too ... Im paying $20 a month for Chat GPT.

I love Pi, but I'm not on the market for asking it to act like Hitler or talk about relating to Mother Teresa or not.

The ability to say "Hey what's happened in the OpenAI saga in the last 8 hours" or "How did <my sports team> do last night" and get a voice response while I'm walking my dog is the sort of thing I care about.

Sure im just testing how neutral it is as I want my AI as neutral as possible and it's fun to test out using it with friends ... for me personally.

I have made Pi go off the rails (things it said in responses to my out there questions lol) with my tests and it has cracked my friends and I up. Fun!

> I am a little annoyed at how much their rollouts often disrupt service for paying customers.

Same for me. The days following Dev Day were horrible, and now I'm randomly in a state as if they were rebooting their machines but without killing the session, so that I can continue normally after a minute or so.

And since Dev Day GPT-4 is really slow.

I gave up using it, it really is just too slow.
Really apologize for the disruption, unrelated to the events of this week and also not related to the voice rollout. The team is working fast on a fix! Hang tight.
Same - frankly, it's crazy how often the service is interrupted for paying users.
What is annoying is this isn't just ChatGTP but the whole API.

I was just getting ready to deploy the an assistant based chat bot when this happened. It underscores the importance of designing systems that fail gracefully when a service is unavailable.

Apologies for the disruption, would love to hear feedback in the meantime on the Assistants API and how you are liking it!
I really like it so far.

My only gripes:

- Sometimes it can be a bit rough getting it to call my functions with the correct data.

- It sometimes won't try to search my files and makes up it's own answer (even though the correct answer is in the files)

- The outage, of course.

But I've mostly worked around that through creative prompts.

I wonder why this product is so unreliable. Perhaps because they keep messing with it and tweaking it instead of having a stable software that isn't updated almost daily.

I like to use chatgpt for enhancing productivity for rote tasks but I keep finding I can't rely on it. Is there a reliable generative text AI out there?

Like how FB and Google just update willy nilly and you're stuck with whatever you get no matter the workflow issues. Should be able to pick a version, even if it's a sliding window.
Probably because the system is new and they are still working through the bugs. When, for example, is the last time you noticed a Gmail outage? Nowadays almost never, but 10 year ago it happened multiple times a year. Similarly, GitHub outages are also becoming less long and less frequent.
Another OpenAI outage. Just as frequent as GitHub outages. [0]

Before, I would have recommend [1] to contact the CEO of OpenAI for support. It turns out there is no CEO to contact this time until this chaos is over.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237794

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38191468

In the last 10 years I personally can't remember a single time I wasn't able to access GitHub. On the other hand, in a single year using ChatGPT as a paid customer I experienced a countless outages.
If this is related to the weekend’s events, it’s just sad. I subscribed a few weeks ago and chatgpt 4 is such a handy thing to have. They potentially broke up a great company and product for nothing.

I think it was Roon on Twitter who put it best: “wanton destruction of a beautiful thing”.

"They potentially broke up a great company and product for nothing."

Wake up, the AI chatbot craze phase is over. Find some other ways to boost your productivity that are more reliable and will not turn your brain into pudding.

I don’t use it for productivity, I’m not a software engineer.
I use it for productivity and it's great. Why should I stop doing that?
Chatbots assistants make you too reliant on a service which reliability you can't control.

First, there is the fact that ChatGPT and it's cousins require an active internet connection, unlike some other tools that similarly boosted human productivity (like a calculator program).

Second, it is server-based utility. Meaning, even if you have internet connection, server might be down for some reason.

Third, while training your mind to be reliant to ChatGPT, you gradually lose the patience and ability to think outside the box. If your first move when you face a problem is to ask ChatGPT for a solution, then it's no good.

The third one may seem like harmless since we are already using Google, but it's not. Google still requires you to filter the data and go through each listed page manually. In other words, you still are using your brain somewhat. With chatbots, you lose even that "do it yourself" analysis.

Unrelated, just the normal challenges of running a service with 100M weekly active users. Sorry for the disruption and hang tight!
Who fixed it?
You win the thread.

Finally working as intended. Perhaps now people will use their brains more, instead of relying on stupid chatbots.

> use their brains more, instead of relying on stupid chatbots

As someone with a diagnosed mental illness (ADHD), chatgpt has helped me more than adderall (prescription scheduled 2 stimulant).

As skeptical of web 3.0 stuff (crypto, nfts etc) as i usually am (just like yourself), chatgpt/llms seems like they have actual value (the valuation might be bubble but should revert to a positive average unlike nfs after the hype wears off).

As a paid ChatGPT user for many months now I’m glad they move so fast making the service better. I happily take that over a slowly improving but always reliable service. Let reliability come later. For now it’s great they move fast even at the cost of service disruption.
As long as this is reasonably communicated to all who pay, I’m generally of the same mind.

It just takes a “this is a beta, there may be the occasional outage” banner.

I know it would probably be a little more work but I would appreciate a `stable` and a `preview` site/endpoint. There are times when things go down that I need it and it would be nice to have a stable endpoint to hit. Yes, it's great that they're moving quickly but I pay $20 a month... I think they can do a little more to guarantee uptime.
Completely agree. At work we make everything so bulletproof that leads to zero innovation and it's painful.
If this was GitHub (or even X or Threads) that went down, you would never see a comment like this:

"As a paid GitHub user for many months now I’m glad they move so fast making the service better. I happily take that over a slowly improving but always reliable service. Let reliability come later. For now it’s great they move fast even at the cost of service disruption."

No user accepts frequent service disruption. Especially GitHub which falls over more times than X or Threads.

It depends what it is! GitHub is basically infrastructure so yes.. but I'll take the tradeoff with chat gpt
Totally agree. GitHub is definitely a more core service that more people rely on than ChatGPT (plus if you're like me you just use Claude until they fix the issue).
> If this was GitHub

But it isn't.

Most people don’t rely on ChatGPT for production work flows like they do for GitHub. Of course users are going to have different expectations for different services.
Maybe you would see these comments if github actually innovated fast. They could make a search that finds what you are looking for, for instance.
GitHub is down all the time. Especially actions.
That's because GitHub haven't really innovated in years.

They have some good icing (actions is pretty good) but the cake is still just a boxed cake mix from 2010.

Well, the problem with those 3 examples is I think they all basically do most of what people want from them already, so if they don't change that is mostly fine. Stability is more important for their users.

ChatGPT on the other hand, isn't finished baking yet, and all the companies that are building a product on top of it are doing it because they expect more, and they expect more on a VC startup timetable, which means quickly.

Edit: and, you know, given how new the space is, there is a relative dearth of companies who have integrated ChatGPT in mission-critical ways that can't withstand an API service disruption or two.

Wait, is this a serious comment or a joke?

I am a paying customer and paid for the text generation. I don't care, _at all_, about voice input or anything else. I want what I am paying for. Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Google Maps can all break intermittently.. I don't choose to pay for those things.

Not when my workflow has been modified to rely on present tech and time is of the essence.

Going back to "the old ways" breaks my workflow and makes me not trust them.

They can experiment all they want with beta testers or internal networks.

I mean business survival 101 is not depend on a single failure point
Yes, this is my personal workflow though. Academic/school.

My backup is much more manual/slow, and I can't always keep pace with live lectures w/o my GPT setup for note-taking, etc.

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> I’m glad they move so fast making the service better.

I'm afraid this part is over. :-/. Hope they at least stay in business and keep providing what they already have. I'm trying to get the max before they collapse. Last days I'm using GPT-4 for coding, it's amazing tool when you get used to. It will be really a big loss if it's gone. As for those without access I feel sorry. Digital divide becomes wider and more real.

Doubt MS will provide anything like ChatGPT-4 Plus for $20/month. It may take them a year to replicated, assuming they get the core experts from OpenAI. And then they will be focused on business customers.

Whatever, it is a free service that is also amazing. If it's down, it's down but I agree, if you are a paying member it should be more reliable.
Thank you for not posting mindless conspiracy theories or stupid jokes about the CEO having something to do with it.
I'm down for a good stupid joke. And if HN's board decides to fire me over it... wait till I come back tomorrow with Satya and 90% of the company behind me
I'd love if the only reply was "Resistance is futile" in case of any error.
It also signed the petition and refuses to work under this board.
I'm getting random CATS errors.

CATS: HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN !!

CATS: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.

I’ve been using gpt-4-1106-preview from the API (mostly to use retrieval) and it’s insanely slow. I can submit something and watch a YouTube it takes so long sometimes. I can’t imagine the issues they’re having trying to scale this, present drama excluded.
Same. gpt-4-1106-preview has been brutally slow, which is a bummer since as of a few days ago, it got a lot faster in our evals.

I'm one of the lucky ones to have Claude API access but it's garbage for almost anything technical, so I don't use it. (Solid for writing and liberal arts stuff though)

This whole nonsense around OpenAI made me sign up for Azure OpenAI access, which takes 10 days to get approved by their team (lol). I emailed my buddy who works at Microsoft Research and told him this was absurd, and in the form I used bunch of curse words and copy/pasted my OpenAI billing statement.

I got approved in 12 hours. As usual, it's who you know in this industry...

`gpt-4-0314` gives me

"openai.InternalServerError: Error code: 500 - {'error': {'message': 'The server had an error processing your request. Sorry about that! You can retry your request, or contact us through our help center at help.openai.com if you keep seeing this error. (Please include the request ID ----- in your email.)', 'type': 'server_error', 'param': None, 'code': None}}"

https://phind.com is up and running for those looking for an alternative.

Disclosure: I'm a co-founder.

I actually recommended Phind internally at my company about 10 minutes ago. It's the only service I've used besides ChatGPT-4 that has helped in coding.

Really impressive site. Takes a lot for me to use any other coding assistant since I think they're mostly grifters or wastes of time, but Phind is legitimately pretty helpful.

Since this reads like a paid comment (it isn't, I still don't even pay for Phind yet), I'll elaborate and say what I used Phind for was CUDA-specific and cv2 debugging and code examples that GPT-4-turbo kept shitting the bed on. I suspect that Phind may have better performance when it comes to lower level software development, but I haven't done enough comparisons to truly say.

Gave it a go and was actually very impressed. Gave it a Nix question that I asked ChatGPT 3.5 last week (which ChatGPT had got completely wrong). It got it right first go and included all the sources that I had used to come to same conclusion, so that was cool!
Hey folks! The team is aware and working on a fix. Should be resolved shortly, you can follow along on: https://status.openai.com/incidents/n254wyd7nml7
Are the only people that didnt threaten to leave H1B’s and other sponsored employees that are worried about getting deported if Microsoft isn't a 100% sure thing?

Just like at Twitter?

Thank you, we appreciate what you all do.
Will sessions be preserved or will all chats be reset to zero when things come back online?
Ok, this is clearly not helped by the x post mentioning free voice interface for all free participants. Imagine how overwhelmed the infrastructure must be now. Why cause this problem? So much intrigue
Why paid users like me should suffer because OpenAI decided to give voice services to millions of people, without having resources for that? This is shameless:

We're experiencing exceptionally high demand. Please hang tight as we work on scaling our systems.