Tech / Technology

ChatGPT is down. What we know about the major outage.

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After announcing updates to ChatGPT earlier this week, OpenAI’s chatbot is down. Here’s what we know so far.
ChatGPT logo on a smartphone

ChatGPT is down for subscribers and free users.

According to OpenAI’s status monitoring site and Down Detector (which shares the same parent company as Mashable) both reported major outages. As of 6:02 a.m. PT/9:02 a.m. ET, OpenAI says it is aware of the issue and continuing to investigate it.

Yesterday afternoon, Mashable reported issues with ChatGPT’s ability to generate DALL-E 3 images, although it’s unclear if this is a related issue. At the time a spokesperson for OpenAI said all systems are full operational on their end. Earlier this week, OpenAI announced updates to ChatGPT at its very first developer conference. This included integrating DALL-E 3 with ChatGPT, updating its knowledge cutoff date to April 2023, and deploying GPT-4 Turbo to ChatGPT Plus users.

This story is developing…

Tech / Technology

ChatGPT Plus users reporting issues since the DALL-E 3 upgrade

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After an upgrade that integrated DALL-E 3 within ChatGPT, users are reporting issues.
ChatGPT app on a smartphone

ChatGPT users are struggling to generate images since OpenAI announced new updates.

An OpenAI spokesperson said all systems are fully operational, which matches up with its status monitoring site. Yet, reported problems spiked around 2 p.m. ET Tuesday, according to Down Detector (which is also owned by Mashable’s parent company Ziff Davis) and have continued to show high outage reports.

Mashable employees experienced errors in generating images around the same time. Users on the ChatGPT subreddit also reported issues. Several users pointed out that ChatGPT wouldn’t generate images despite the new integration with DALL-E 3.

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GPT-4 Turbo and custom GPTs announced: What they are, how to try them

Despite successfully generating images for Saira Mueller, a freelance editor who works with Mashable, last night, ChatGPT told her this afternoon that it didn’t have the capacity to generate images.

It then backpedaled after Mueller expressed her confusion and said it could, but didn’t actually generate anything. Instead, it mused about what to include in a prompt: “To create an image of a photorealistic landscape on another planet, please provide any specific details you’d like to include, such as the type of terrain, the presence of any celestial bodies in the sky, vegetation, or color scheme preferences.”

When Mueller followed up, it showed an error message.

ChatGPT showing an error message

A Mashable editor ultimately got an error message after ChatGPT failed to generate an image.
Credit: Screenshot: Mashable / OpenAI

At OpenAI’s developer conference on Monday, CEO Sam Altman announced ChatGPT would be doing away with the model selection dropdown, which featured the DALL-E, internet browser, and plugins options. Instead these would all be integrated within the standard interface for ChatGPT Plus users.

Users with the updated integration are the ones experiencing the issues. It’s unconfirmed whether OpenAI has deployed the updates, causing the outages, but given the timeline announced by Altman yesterday, this would match up.

Mashable has reached out to OpenAI for more information and will update this story if it hears back.

Tech / Technology

GPT-4 Turbo and custom GPTs announced: What they are, how to try them

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At OpenAI’s first developer conference, Sam Altman introduced GPT-4 Turbo with a slew of new features and updates.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman giving the keynote at the company's developer conference

With its new model GPT-4 Turbo, OpenAI continues to pave the way for AI-powered possibilities.

On Monday at OpenAI’s very first developer conference, CEO Sam Altman announced the release of the new model. It has a context window of 128,000 tokens, meaning it can process around 300 pages of text in a single prompt and incorporates vision, text-to-speech, and DALL-E 3. Plus, it’s about a third cheaper than GPT-4.

Even if you’re not a developer directly using the API, you can experience the improvements right away through ChatGPT and a new way of creating custom GPTs without coding knowledge. Here’s what to know about GPT-4 Turbo and how to access it.

GPT-4 Turbo on ChatGPT

With the superpowered large language model, ChatGPT will be more accurate and useful. First of all, the cutoff date for ChatGPT’s knowledge has finally been updated to April 2023. Next, OpenAI has done away with the option to toggle between different models — GPT 3.5, GPT 4, internet browsing, plugins, and DALL-E 3 — and will automatically detect what to use based on the purpose of your prompt, so the interface is simpler and more intuitive. These updates are available to ChatGPT Plus users.

OpenAI also announced a new initiative called Copyright Shield. For ChatGPT Enterprise and the developer platform, OpenAI will defend its customers and pay the costs incurred if they face any copyright infringement claims.

The knowledge cutoff date, elimination of the model picker tool, and Copyright Shield are all live today.

Custom GPTs

Nudging closer to its dream of AGI (artificial general intelligence), OpenAI launched a platform for users to develop their own custom versions of ChatGPT. If that sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it’s an evolved version of ChatGPT plugins, but now with more capabilities.

Users can experiment with pre-existing custom GPTs like ones for creating your own designs on Canva or automating tasks with Zapier, or they can create their own chatbot without any coding knowledge. GPTs are designed to understand natural language, so all you need is an idea and some instructions to build your very own AI agent.

Later this month, OpenAI will launch a GPT Store, so users can create and browse custom GPTs, much like an app store. So yes, you’ll also be able to make money off your GPT.

ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users can access example GPTs today, with access expanding to more users eventually.