On Monday, OpenAI, a company that does AI research, was forced to temporarily shut down its ChatGPT service after customers complained that they could see the titles of other users’ chats with the bot. Bloomberg reported that the fault was caused by an unknown open-source program, however it has now been rectified. The company has not yet discovered the cause of the issue. The chatbot, which has more than 100 million users globally, was unavailable for roughly four hours on Monday. By Monday night, OpenAI put it back online. Even if ChatGPT is currently operational again, the bot displays a notice that states, “History is temporarily unavailable. We’re working to get this functionality back as quickly as we can. Some users’ conversation titles initially appeared in this section due to a mix-up.
Users of ChatGPT and GPT-4 had submitted multiple user complaints to Down Detector, a website that tracks service outages online. Since late last year, the ChatGPT chatbot has completely taken over the internet. OpenAI announced GPT-4 last week, replacing the GPT-3.5 platform on which the original bot was created. Currently, ChatGPT Plus uses GPT-4 while ChatGPT users continue to utilize the earlier version.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and creator of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, admitted in a recent interview with ABC News that he is “a little bit afraid” of the chatbot’s potential. According to him, ChatGPT can “eliminate” many human jobs, according to ABC News. Altman warned, “We’ve got to be careful here. He said, “I think people should be delighted that we are a little bit afraid of this. He voiced worry that the AI bot could be misused to cause harm. “I’m especially concerned that these models could be utilized for widespread disinformation,” he stated. When they get more proficient at creating computer code, they could be employed in malicious cyberattacks.