ChatGPT Back Up After ‘Major Outage’ at AI Platform

OpenAI had restored its ChatGPT Wednesday (June 5) following a “major” outage the prior day.

As Tom’s Guide noted in a report Wednesday, while ChatGPT will sometimes have minor outages when generating text or images, this was the first significant outage for the artificial intelligence (AI) company’s flagship product in some time.

“We experienced a major outage impacting all users on all plans of ChatGPT,” the company told users Tuesday (June 4), per the report. “The impact included all ChatGPT related services. The impact did not include platform.openai.com or the API. This incident started June 4th at 2:15p GMT and was resolved June 4th at 5:01p GMT.”

According to the report, ChatGPT went down for some users for more than four hours Tuesday, came back online, then crashed again. The company is recommending anyone having problems with the service on either desktop or mobile to implement a hard refresh.

Meanwhile, this week saw a group of current and former employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind sign a public letter calling for protection from retaliation when sharing concerns about the “serious risks” associated with these companies’ AI products.

In the letter, titled “A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence,” the employees express concerns about the lack of effective oversight of leading AI companies, arguing that these corporations have strong financial incentives to skirt proper scrutiny.

The letter also argues that while ordinary whistleblower protections focus on illegal activities, many of the risks associated with AI technologies are still unregulated. This gap leaves employees as one of the few groups that can hold these companies accountable.

Elsewhere on the AI front, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is set to caution financial institutions about risks associated with the use of the technology.

While AI is already used in the financial services space for forecasting, fraud prevention, customer support and other uses, its rapid evolution presents risks and opportunities, Yellen is expected say in a speech to be delivered Thursday (June 6) at the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s 2024 Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Financial Stability.

“Specific vulnerabilities may arise from the complexity and opacity of AI models; inadequate risk management frameworks to account for AI risks; and interconnections that emerge as many market participants rely on the same data and models,” Yellen said in excerpts of the speech provided to PYMNTS by the Treasury Department.

“Concentration among vendors developing models, providing data and providing cloud services may also introduce risks, which could amplify existing third-party service provider risks,” Yellen added. “And insufficient or faulty data could also perpetuate or introduce new biases in financial decision making.”