Frequent ChatGPT Downtime Means People Are Using It, And That Is 'A Great Problem To Have'

Elad Gil
entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private technology companies

Big titans like Google and Meta, as well as many smaller ones, were competing in the field of AI. But things were mostly about incorporating AI capabilities into their respective products and services.

Things were rather quiet, calm, with little disruption on the surface.

That, until OpenAI stepped in with ChatGPT.

Thanks to OpenAI's rapid ascent, and success after success, especially after it introduced AIs, like DALL·E, DALL·E 2, GPT-2, GPT-3 and some others, ChatGPT simply brought things to a whole different level.

OpenAI, which was launched in late 2015, disrupted the entire AI market and ecosystem, and have many others scrambled.

Elad Gil
Elad Gil during the 49th episode of the Logan Bartlett Show.

Even OpenAI didn't expected this to happen so fast, and because of that, ChatGPT experienced frequent downtime.

That is actually a good thing, said a renown Silicon Valley angel investor.

Elad Gil, an entrepreneur and investor or advisor at numerous tech companies, like Airbnb, Coinbase, Checkr, Gusto, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, and Wish, believes that ChatGPT is one of the most visible sign of an extremely successful tech product:

" [...] the fact that ChatGPT is down all the time right now is a great sign of product-market fit. It’s because too many people are using it. That’s a great problem to have."

"It just really comes out in terms of the enthusiasm that small initial cohort has for the product."

"If a product is broken all the time but everybody keeps using it, there’s clearly product-market fit."

Gil made this statement on an episode of the Logan Bartlett Show podcast.

He noted that he witnessed a similar enthusiasm and situation, during Twitter' early days.

Based on his knowledge and experience, the similarity between OpenAI and Twitter is that both are representations of an idea that just works, and that they work they way up very quickly.

" [...] And once they started working, they just kept working."

On the contrary, he also said that there are times when ideas may not be able to take off, no matter how much time an entrepreneur sinks into them.

"People end up spending years and years and years of life just grinding away on something that isn’t going to work, because maybe it will work if I do these three more tweaks, and maybe it will work this month if I keep going. For a very small number of cases that happens, but for the majority it works immediately, or near immediately."

He added that:

"There’s enormous opportunity cost on your time, and most things don’t work. Most of the time, you should actually figure out when do you give up and when should you actually quit. It’s really hard to know."

"One thing I’ve noticed is that people who have worked on things without product-market fit—that they thought had product-market fit—when they finally go and work on something that truly is working, they realize the immense difference and the degree to which they were fooling themselves."

For sure, OpenAI's ChatGPT is phenomenal. In the news and in the field, in development platforms and as word-of-mouth, the AI has become a trending topic.

And since more and more people are using it for various reasons, they unearth even more of the AI's sophistication and uses. Things then repeat, and OpenAI is seeing the fruit of its work.