OpenAI Demonstrates "Character Voices" And "The Great AI Black Out"
ChatGPT Has a Very Creepy Laugh, And What Happens When We Have To Think For Ourselves For A Few Hours?
OpenAI has released another video showing off its GPT4o and it is impressive. Now, this model still has not been released to its user base, not even to the Plus subscribers. But, this delay may be due to the Sky fallout.
In this video, an OpenAI employee asks GPT4o to generate voices for a majestic lion, a squeaky mouse, a wise owl, and an evil fox. It succeeds in all of these voices, and is able to make modifications when requested to do so. The omnimodel attempts to do a "creepy" laugh. Not sure where the training data came from for this one, but that laugh is downright unsettling. Hopefully, this is not the model's "I'm going to take over the world" laugh.
The video is also impressive in the collaboration back and forth between the OpenAI employee and the GPT-4o voice. He is easily able to ask the model to switch voices, and interrupt the model.
These voice technologies could be used in gaming, animation, or book narration. (ElevenLabs is already offering similar tech on their site.)
Check out the new video on OpenAI's site. You are hereby forewarned about the creepy laugh, though.
Major AI Outages Highlight Infrastructure Vulnerabilities
In an unprecedented event, three major AI platforms—OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Perplexity—experienced simultaneous outages on June 4th, sparking widespread user frustration and raising questions about the resilience of current AI infrastructures.
Timeline of Events
The first signs of trouble appeared in the early hours of June 4th, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT going offline multiple times throughout the day. According to OpenAI's service status tracker, the initial outage began at 12:21 AM PDT and was resolved by 04:19 AM PDT, only for another disruption to occur at 07:33 AM PDT, lasting until 10:17 AM PDT.
Simultaneously, Claude and Perplexity reported service interruptions, likely due to frustrated ChatGPT users switching over to Claude. Perplexity also experienced issues, likely pointing to users switching over to their model when Claude went down.
At one point, OpenAI generated its error message in pirate speak:
Community Reaction
The AI community did not disappoint in their reactions to the outage. "Millions forced to use brain as OpenAI's ChatGPT takes morning off."
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I was using ChatGPT during this time and experienced the disruption. I only experienced a slowdown and not a complete outage. It is not the first time I've noticed ChatGPT slowing down. It's very annoying. I've been attributing these slowdowns to free users now have accessing to a model that used to be exclusive to the paid tier. Hooray for the free users. Not so great for the paid users trying to get work done.
The Neuron included this image from one user reporting "people are going to Claude but Claude can't browse the web so people are going to perplexity but perplexity is hitting chatgpt and GPT is down so it's hitting Claude with all this traffic chaos and all 3 are now down. Also nobody uses Gemini but just to show they're getting a lot of traffic they shut down too. That's how we got the AI blackout."
An aspiring musician wrote a song about the AI Blackout, set to Korean Drumstep, on HeyMusic.ai, with lyrics such as:
"Users in a rush, seeking answers fast,
Perplexity’s hitting ChatGPT for tasks.
GPT’s overloaded; the system won’t last.
And back to Claude they go, circles from the past."
The Neuron pointed out that: "Back in the real world, most didn't notice that ChatGPT went down cause, TBH, most people don't use ChatGPT. And that's sometimes easy to forget in our little AI bubble where everyone uses and talks about AI 24/7."
Final Thoughts
The advancements in AI, such as OpenAI's new character voices, continue to push the boundaries of what technology can achieve. However, Tuesday's "AI Blackout" reminds us of the underlying challenges and the need for robust systems to support these innovations. And, the memes, jokes and music that resulted from the blackout show it helps to keep a good sense of humor about it all. Maybe we've all remembered how to use our brains after all.
Vocabulary Key
Additional Resources for Inquisitive Minds: