Highlights:

  • OpenAI’s most recent announcement follows what the company termed a “major outage,” affecting its most popular chatbot and development tools to build upon its AI.
  • The company stated at the conference that approximately 100 million people now utilize ChatGPT weekly and that over 90% of Fortune 500 companies are developing tools on OpenAI’s platform.

OpenAI is currently facing challenges related to an influx of “abnormal traffic,” which indicates the presence of individuals attempting to overwhelm its services. This occurrence sheds light on the underlying reason behind the recent outages experienced by ChatGPT.

The startup, backed by Microsoft Corp., stimulated global advancements in generative AI. It has identified indications of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, in which external attackers repeatedly ping a platform to overwhelm it.

“We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing work to mitigate this,” stated the startup in its latest system update. After regular business hours, company representatives did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

OpenAI’s most recent announcement follows what the company termed a “major outage,” affecting its most popular chatbot and development tools to build upon its AI. However, the organization reported that the problem, which caused atypically high error rates throughout its software and AI platform, had been resolved.

OpenAI unveiled a preview version of GPT-4 Turbo, a more potent and swifter iteration of its most recent large language model, which forms the foundation of ChatGPT, at its inaugural developer conference.

Launched this month a year ago, the chatbot incited a worldwide frenzy regarding everything artificial intelligence-related. The company stated at the conference that approximately 100 million people now utilize ChatGPT weekly and that over 90% of Fortune 500 companies are developing tools on OpenAI’s platform.

However, ChatGPT’s developer must also contend with products from tech titans, well-funded AI startups, and, most recently, Elon Musk, an early backer of OpenAI.