Most experts agree that occasional outages are to be expected among any cloud-based services, and consumer-facing AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Mistral Le Chat, and Microsoft CoPilot are no exception.
Among them, “outages don’t raise many eyebrows for two reasons,” Bradley Shimmin, chief analyst of AI platforms, analytics, and data management for research firm Omdia, told Computerworld. One is that such services are “asynchronous in nature with highly variable response times seen as the norm,” he noted. Secondly, they’re not typically used within a mission-crtiical context, making downtime less of an issue than if they were being used in this way.
Indeed, outages are common even among cloud hyperscalers with mission-critical services such as Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft, so there’s no need to sound an alarm if an AI chatbot goes down for a while, noted Pareekh Jain, CEO of EIIRTrend & Pareekh Consulting. Still, all eyes will be on OpenAI to see how the company handles the outage, which could portend its own future success as well as the safety and security of AI going forward, he noted.