OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora video generator are currently experiencing an outage that has made them inaccessible for many users.

The issue also affects the application programming interfaces that developers use to integrate the company’s technology into their software.

According to the outage tracking service Down Detector, the issue emerged around 1:30 p.m. ET. The Verge reported that some users who attempted to launch ChatGPT were greeted by an error message. In other cases, the chatbot loads successfully but doesn’t process prompts. 

OpenAI stated on its status page that it’s seeing “high error rates for ChatGPT, APIs, and Sora.” The company detailed that the problem appears to be caused by an issue with an “upstream provider” on which it relies to power its infrastructure. OpenAI didn’t specify which provider is affected, the nature of the glitch or when its services might come back online.

The company’s last major outage was on Dec. 11, when ChatGPT and other products went offline for about four hours. In a blog post published the following day, OpenAI detailed that the issue was caused by the addition of a new telemetry collection component to its Kubernetes environment. The software used more hardware resources than the company expected, which led to errors. 

The latest outage to affect OpenAI’s services isn’t the only reason it entered the spotlight today.

This morning, The Information published new details about the ChatGPT developer’s partnership with Microsoft Corp., from which it received a $10 billion investment early last year. As part of the deal, OpenAI gave Microsoft broad access to its portfolio of artificial intelligence models.

The partnership agreement reportedly specifies that Microsoft would lose access to OpenAI’s technology in the event the latter company develops AGI, or artificial general intelligence. This is a term for a hypothetical future AI with human-level reasoning skills. But Microsoft’s agreement with OpenAI defines AGI differently, according to today’s report from The Information. 

Under the agreement, Microsoft will consider OpenAI’s technology to be AGI once it generates $100 billion in profit. In other words, Microsoft won’t lose access to the ChatGPT developer’s AI models until that financial milestone is met. OpenAI reportedly doesn’t expect to turn a profit until 2029, but estimates that its revenue will grow to $100 billion in the same time frame.

Photo: Focal Foto/Flickr