Tag: Perplexity

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Major AI Outage Raises Concerns About Reliability and Resilience

Image Credit: PromaticWorks

A widespread outage affecting several prominent AI platforms, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity, has sparked concerns about the reliability and resilience of the AI industry’s infrastructure. The incident, which occurred on June 4, 2024, left millions of users worldwide without access to these critical AI services for several hours.
The most severely impacted service was OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which experienced a major outage lasting several hours, starting around 7:33 AM PT. The popular AI chatbot was unavailable to users on all plans, with OpenAI describing the incident as a “major outage.” While the service was restored around 10:17 AM PT, ChatGPT faced another disruption later in the day, which was resolved by 7:00 PM PT.


Anthropic’s Claude and Perplexity also faced technical difficulties during the outage, although these were resolved more quickly than the issues experienced by ChatGPT. Google’s Gemini, on the other hand, remained operational, but some users reported brief connectivity issues.


Experts suggest that the simultaneous outage could be indicative of a broader infrastructure issue or a problem at an internet-scale level, similar to outages affecting multiple social media platforms concurrently. Another theory points to the possibility that the disruptions faced by Claude and Perplexity might have been caused by an overwhelming surge in traffic following ChatGPT’s outage, causing these services to reach their capacity limits.


The incident has raised concerns about the reliability and robustness of current AI infrastructure to handle increasing loads, as well as the transparency of AI service providers in communicating issues and outages to users. The outage comes on the heels of an open letter published by several anonymous former employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind, warning of “reckless” behavior in the AI space and citing concerns about the lack of effective oversight and the potential for misuse or unintended consequences of AI technologies.
As the AI industry continues to evolve and play a more integral role in our daily lives, the need for robust and resilient infrastructure, as well as effective communication and transparency, has never been more crucial.

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Meta’s Open Source AGI: A Game-Changer for AI Development and Accessibility

Meta, the company led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is actively developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) and has indicated that it may release it as open source software. AGI is a form of AI that is capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge in a way that is similar to human intelligence. Zuckerberg has stated that the long-term vision for Meta is to build AGI, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available for everyone’s benefit.

 

Meta is bringing together two of its AI research teams, FAIR (Facebook AI Research) and GenAI, to work towards this goal. The company is also working on training its next-generation model, Llama 3, and is building a massive compute infrastructure to support future AI models. This includes plans to have 350,000 H100 GPUs by the end of the year, which would amount to almost 600,000 H100 equivalents of compute.

 

Zuckerberg has expressed that AI and the metaverse are closely linked, and he envisions smart glasses as a primary way people will interact with AI and the metaverse. He has also mentioned that Meta’s approach to AGI will be to open source it as long as it is safe and responsible to do so, although he has not committed to a definitive plan for open sourcing any potential AGI developed by Meta.

 

The move towards open sourcing AGI aligns with Meta’s and Zuckerberg’s advocacy for keeping AI technology open-source, which has sparked debate within the tech industry. This stance is somewhat in contrast to more secretive rivals and has led to the formation of the AI Alliance, a group launched by Meta and IBM to promote an open-source vision of AI.

 

Zuckerberg’s announcement follows a trend of tech leaders downplaying the dangers of AGI, and it comes at a time when the tech industry is hotly debating the control and accessibility of AGI technology. The decision to open source AGI is ultimately Zuckerberg’s, given his voting control over Meta’s stock.

In summary, Meta is investing in the development of AGI with the intention of potentially open sourcing it, which would be a significant contribution to the AI ecosystem and could influence the future direction of AI development and accessibility.