Is CHATGPT DOWN?! #OMG! What to do?!

I turned to ChatGPT for a productivity hack this morning only to find the service not working. I turned instead to Gemini and Co-Pilot. The outage at OpenAI today got me thinking... how many solutions, apps, integrations are disrupted today?

If you've kept pace with Google for the last 25+ years, you'd agree the ubiquitous status of the brand and their solutions would lead anyone to see them as invincible and untouchable. However, ChatGPT changed all that, seemingly overnight.

#ChatGPT and OpenAI have risen to be top-of-mind and now a generation seeks answers and information first by engaging various AI tools. At almost any watercooler chat, happy hour gathering, or family meal and we're sure to hear something like, "I was on ChatGPT and, did you know that {insert #CliffClaven facts}." And those conversations have replaced, "Just Google it."

While I understand artificial intelligence and machine learning are nothing new, the fact that we all have OpenAI and ChatGPT top of mind is proof enough for the team at Google to take this threat seriously.

Although there is no denying Google's dominance in each field they operate in, there's also no denying a real challenger has emerged in Google's core product segments. As a result of their rise in the ranks for OpenAI, it is possible to imagine someone or something dethroning Google and YouTube as the #1 and #2 places for people searching the inter-webs for information, insight, education, and entertainment, etc.

No doubt companies of all sizes, and tech-savvy entrepreneurs, have raced to integrate #AI with other platforms and solutions for productivity hacks, churning through and gleaning insights from massive amounts of data, and personalizing consumer experiences - to name a few.

With the proliferation of integrations with ChatGPT and OpenAI, these companies are staking their own consumer-facing and business operating solutions on the stability of OpenAI's systems. I sought a productivity hack of my own this morning but was faced with what appears to be an outage with OpenAI and that got me thinking about the endless number companies, individuals, systems, solutions, and apps that would suffer performance issues as a result.

Look at these two charts from Downdetector for OpenAI and for Google. Notice the scale on # of issues over the last 24 hours for each. Before the data science pros jump on me for such an infinitely small sample - I get it.

I am not suggesting anyone slow down their integrations with artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. I am, however, recommending we remain diligent in best practices related to development, testing, and systems integrity needed for commercialization of solutions that rely on 3rd party integrations, especially AI.

Operating without ChatGPT this morning felt a bit like doing my math homework without a calculator. I can still do long division and find the area of a circle, just not as fast as the computer. Still, I wonder about the impacts to apps, systems, sites, etc that have heavy reliance on OpenAI integrations. How have you been impacted today?