We feared it, we learned to embrace it, and now we can't live without it. What happens when ChatGPT fails and we're stuck with our own brains again?
ChatGPT Outage
June 4th turned out to be a tough day for millions globally. With a major outage early on in the day, the AI app which many have learned to rely on in their daily working life suffered a second service breakdown later on in the day.
Issues were first reported around 2:30am ET / 7:30am BDT / 4:30pm AEST on June 4. OpenAI was able to produce a fix and restore business as usual at around 7:30am ET / 12:30pm BST / 4:30pm AEST. However, the service suffered a failure again later in the afternoon, with many users taking to social media to voice their complaints.
It is still unclear what caused the outage and OpenAI is yet to provide a reason.
Gemini Searches Soar 60% During OpenAI Outage
Interestingly, during this outage people turned to competitor - Google's AI chatbot Gemini. Searches for Gemini increased by 60%, with 327,058 searches just four hours after ChatGPT's outage was first reported.
Analysis from QR Code Generator shows that searches for “ChatGPT down” and “Gemini” trended in parallel, suggesting people perceive Gemini as an alternative to ChatGPT.
Experts from QR Code Generator also observed that the surge in searches for “Gemini” correlates to how much people searched for "ChatGPT down" over the same period. The search volume axes for these two keywords trended in parallel on the morning of June 4th.
Are We Too Reliant on ChatGPT?
Many feared ChatGPT when it was first launched, scared that it would make many jobs obsolete and impact the way we study and work. However, yesterday's outage demonstrated that millions rely on the service everyday. Love it or hate it, it seems like these AI tools aren't going anywhere soon. It seems that we need to learn to embrace these chatbots rather than fear them - and hope that they don't breakdown again anytime soon.
