Quick FAQs on VI Outages
Jonathan Kressaty
Welcome new (and returning) users!
For those who are seeing this for the first time, we send a daily email with updates on our progress and this is the 10th update. You can reply directly to this message to discuss ways VI can improve with the founders, and we hope you do!
VI (Virtual Interface) is a 16-day-old chat bot that reads the internet and connects to sources like your email, browser history, and Slack history to learn more about your context and personalize its responses.
We definitely saw a drop in usage today directly related to outages, and we’re sorry if that impacted your experience.
Q: Why was VI not working today?
A: VI uses APIs provided by OpenAI to interpret your prompt and build responses to your questions. VI also uses OpenAI APIs to calculate the best ways to search your data. When OpenAI has outages, VI may stop working.
OpenAIs services seem to be in and out but everything should be back to normal by this evening. OpenAI’s growth is staggering and impressive, and we’re working on mitigating downstream problems as they scale.
Q: If OpenAI is down, is VI down?
A: Yes – we currently rely on OpenAI to interpret your prompt and format the final response to your questions.
Q: If ChatGPT is down, is VI down?
A: Not necessarily – VI uses OpenAI’s completion APIs, not the ChatGPT service. That said, if a shared underlying service has an issue, VI may also have an issue.
Q: How can I check for status?
A: We don’t have our own status page yet, but if you check https://status.openai.com/ and see any outages, it’s likely that VI also has an outage
Q: Will VI retry my request?
A: No – you’ll need to try again later.
Sometimes VI may seem unresponsive – this may be due to a degraded service, but also may be that VI is doing research and taking a few moments to respond.
Enable Notifications in your browser and you’ll receive a native notification on your computer when VI responds to your question. (Click Enable Notifications at the top of your chat with VI to make it happen!)
What’s New
We’ve improved the Message Composer in a couple small ways:
- Larger text in the composer box
- Message text now wraps as you’re writing
- Hitting the “enter” key on your keyboard no longer sends the message, so you can format longer text blocks into more manageable sections