Why does ChatGPT keep crashing? Because half the planet is trying to use it

Here’s the unavailability message I just received from ChatGPT: an acrostic poem (with verses beginning with each of its initials) to say that the conversational chatbot is currently unavailable due to very high demand. Actually, I saw the issue coming on Monday afternoon, during a class in which I used ChatGPT extensively to illustrate the possibilities of machine learning, and in which many of my students also signed up for the service to test it themselves: we received several error and unavailability messages.

ChatGPT is, plain and simple, the best machine learning-based chatbot that has ever been made available to the public, and its crash means that, at the moment, pretty much half the world is currently exploring its possibilities. From teachers like me, to people with dyslexia who use it to be more confident about the texts they write, to all sorts of developers and content creators, including the one who in a little while used ChatGPT to write a whole hundred-page philosophy book, illustrated its cover using Stable Diffusion, and put it up for sale on Amazon self-published in Kindle format.

The likely repercussions of ChatGPT will not lost on anyone who understands how machine learning works: the technologically short-sighted are left with the fact that ChatGPT writes texts at the…