ChatGPT has been hit by an outage with many users reporting issues assessing the service.
The service's operator OpenAI confirmed the outage is impacting every facet of ChatGPT, including conversations, search, image generation, Codex, Atlas, and more.
An update posted on the OpenAI website said: "We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services.
"We are working on implementing a mitigation."
Downdetector has reported that Chatgpt has been down since 8.32pm.
There were more than 12,000 incidents of people reporting issues with the chatbot as of 8.45pm.
Yesterday, it was reported OpenAi had decided to prioritise the advancement of ChatGPT over more long-term research, prompting the departure of senior staff.
Led by chief executive Sam Altman, it is evolving from a research lab into one of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.
ChatGPT is down for users
| GETTY IMAGESOne person close to the company's research ambitions told the Financial Times: "OpenAI is trying to treat language models now as an engineering problem where they’re scaling up compute and scaling up algorithms and data, and they’re eking out really big gains from doing that.
"But if you want to do original blue-sky research, it is quite tough. And if you don’t find yourself in one of the teams in the centre, it becomes increasingly political."
OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, denied these claims, adding: "Long-term, foundational research remains central to OpenAI and continues to account for the majority of our compute and investment, with hundreds of bottom-up projects exploring long-horizon questions beyond any single product."
"Pairing that research with real-world deployment strengthens our science by accelerating feedback, learning loops and rigour — and we’ve never been more confident in our long-term research roadmap towards an automated researcher."
ChatGPT and other chatbots have already begun being implemented in the workplace | PALATEST DEVELOPMENTS
Jenny Xiao, a partner at Leonis Capital and former researcher at OpenAI, argued its advantage is the hundreds of millions of people who use ChatGPT.
She told the FT: "Everyone’s obsessing over whether OpenAI has the best model.
"That’s the wrong question. They’re converting technical leadership into platform lock-in.
"The moat has shifted from research to user behaviour, and that’s a much stickier advantage."