I say this as a huge fan of GPT, but it's amazing to me how terrible of a company OpenAI is and how quickly we've all latched onto their absolutely terrible platform.
I had a bug that wouldn't let me login to my work OpenAI account at my new job 9 months ago. It took them 6 months to respond to my support request and they gave me a generic copy/paste answer that had nothing to do with my problem. We spend tons and tons of money with them and we could not get anyone to respond or get on a phone. I had to ask my coworkers to generate keys for everything. One day, about 8 months later, it just started working again out of nowhere.
We switched to Azure OpenAI Service right after that because OpenAI's platform is just so atrociously bad for any serious enterprise to work with.
I've personally never scaled a B2B&C company from 0 to over 1 billion users in less than a year, but I do feel like it's probably pretty hard. Especially setting up something like a good support organization in a time of massive labor shortages seems like it would be pretty tough.
I know they have money, but money isn't a magic wand for creating people. They could've also kept it a limited beta for much longer, but that would've killed their growth velocity.
So here is a great product that provides no SLA at all. And we all accept it, because having it most of the time is still better than having it not at all ever.
I'm not judging them at all as I agree with your core statement, just saying it's quite remarkable that companies around the world who spend 6 months on MSA revisions in legal over nothing are now OK with a platform that takes 6 months to respond to support requests.
> I say this as a huge fan of GPT, but it's amazing to me how terrible of a company OpenAI is and how quickly we've all latched onto their absolutely terrible platform.
Your example is clearly not acceptable, but I can see reasons for it.
OpenAI apparently was somewhere between "I can't see people finding this useful" and "I guess" when deciding on releasing ChatGPT at all in the first place.
If that's the case, I doubt they were envisioning a flood of users, who needed a customer support person to handle their case. They have to spin-up an entire division to handle all of this. And I'm sure some of the use-cases are going to get into complex technical issues that might be hard to train people for.
They can no longer remain a heads-down company full of engineers working on AI.
I'm not excusing it, but I can see why things like your situation might occur. Although 6 months for a response is obviously ridiculous. If you are paying them a significant amount of money, and it is impacting your business, then that's all on OpenAI to fix ASAP.
ChatGPT has been broken for me for two months, regardless of whether I use the iOS app or the web app. The backend is giving HTTP 500 errors – clearly a problem on their end. Yet in two months I haven’t been able to get past their first line of support. They keep giving me autogenerated responses telling me to do things like clear my cache, turn off ad blockers, and provide information I’ve already given them. They routinely ignore me for weeks at a time. And they continue to bill me. I see no evidence this technical fault has made it to anybody who could do anything about it and I’m not convinced an actual human has seen my messages.
OpenAI is relatively young on the adoption and scaling front.
Also, they need to remain flexible most likely in their infrastructure to make the changes.
As an architecture guy, I sense when the rate of change slows down more SLA type stuff will come up, or may be available first to Enterprise customers who will pay for the entire cost of it. Maybe over time there will be enough slack there to extend some SLA to general API users.
In the meantime, monitoring API's ourselves isn't that crazy. Great idea to use more than one service.
> I had a bug that wouldn't let me login to my work OpenAI account at my new job 9 months ago.
I also cannot login on Firefox (latest version) with strict privacy settings and AdNauseam on desktop.. and a few weeks ago they broke their website on iOS v14 as well for no apparent reason (it certainly didn't make me to download their app since that require v16.1+).
>Over the past year, we’ve meticulously scraped all Worldcat records. At first, we hit a lucky break. Worldcat was just rolling out their complete website redesign (in Aug 2022). This included a substantial overhaul of their backend systems, introducing many security flaws. We immediately seized the opportunity, and were able scrape hundreds of millions (!) of records in mere days.
>After that, security flaws were slowly fixed one by one, until the final one we found was patched about a month ago. By that time we had pretty much all records, and were only going for slightly higher quality records.
OCLC carelessly fiddlefarted around with their moat and lost it. Poof!
Awesome! Where did the "split_ifs" tactic come from though? Mathlib? In your opinion does it make sense to do program verification without using Mathlib, or would you recommend just using it pretty much all the time?
Yes split_ifs is in Mathlib so I have replaced it with split (twice) which is in Core. I believe there is also an intermediate level Std. I'm not sure why you'd want to avoid Mathlib but I daresay it's possible for many types of problem.
What ever happened to the effort [1] to rename Coq in order to make it less offensive? There were a number of excellent proposals [2] that seemed to die on the vine.
What kind of person is offended at this? It's not even in the ballpark of making the allusion (let alone whether someone should be offended at such an allusion). I refuse to believe there are people this petty.
From what I remember of the discussions on the topic, it's not so much that people are offended by it per se, but there has been many reports of uncomfortable situations from women who use and specifically teach Coq.
Let's be honest, I totally buy that there have been hallway discussions between students about the "Coq teacher" that were wholly inappropriate and should not be encouraged.
Cock also means rooster in English, so really one might say it's perfect in both English and French.
Interestingly, coq is from Latin coccus (rooster) and cock is from Germanic kukkaz (rooster). I don't think there are many words that exist in both French and English with nearly identical pronunciation, the same meaning but unrelated roots!
In French, the way the word "bit" is pronounced sounds the exact same as the French word for cock (not the rooster).
I can assure you that French CS programming students get over it quickly.
There's noone really asking for it to be renamed because it's understood that it's a commonly used foreign word.
I'm not sure why an English professional scientist or programmer would be unable to take the same stance for a programming language invented in another country.
you're assuming that everyone lives in the same shoes as you do - i curse in a professional context very regularly (fuck, shit, etc). i have given technical presentations (that are recorded and made public - youtube) at decently sized venues in the same tone.
What's offensive about a bodypart? Especially if you have one, finding it offensive is rather weird. I, personally, find that whoever came up with the name must have been hilariously innocent, or at least not speaking english. :D
Coq being the first three letters of his name, and also the french name for rooster, the french national emblem.
So yeah, he probably didn't care at all what those letters meant in various languages ( and probably even found the reaction of english natives amusing).
Rocq was my clear favorite, though I would have picked Roc. It's a real shame that effort seems to have stalled. This is a real barrier yet not widely acknowledged as such.
Adding friction to the things you're not trying to do is the whole part of the article. You're creating tunnel "walls" of friction to make it so traveling down the tunnel is the most straightforward action.
Yeah, this is ethically-sourced meat, right? You could have a whole pipeline that trains neural nets to farm gold, and then slaughter it for a steady supply of cabeza to every taco truck in these United States.
I would like to see them offer a decent SLA, but for an increased price.
Ie:
No SLA: $1 per 1000 requests.
With SLA: $2 per 1000 requests. For every minute of downtime, we refund 50% of your daily bill.
Obviously they are free to design their systems to make SLA'd requests have priority when there is a capacity crunch or service issues, and that is really what those customers are paying for.
This is an absolutely ridiculous ask for a company which is already unable to service the extraordinary demand for their product. AWS itself only credits a month if a service is down for over 30 hours[1]
People are going to use OpenAI if it's good. Nobody really cares about SLA if the product is incredible.
Would this really be worth it for them when they can just charge everyone the $2 and tell them to pound sand when there's an outage? Not like there's a proper competitor yet.
