Australian startups built on OpenAI's tech hope for stability amid Altman turmoil
The risks of developing using third-party applications have always been high, but for the thousands of startups already relying on OpenAI for their AI capabilities it's becoming existential.
The drama playing out at OpenAI might have everyone glued to their newsfeeds, and appears to be far from over. But for the thousands of startups that have developed their products and services using OpenAI's API the continued upheaval is an existential concern.
Jason Smale, CEO at PatientNotes, a Melbourne-based clinical note-taking tool that uses AI to write clinical notes for medical professionals, says the situation at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has “definitely made me nervous,” and says that the API has been increasingly unstable in recent weeks.
“You'd have to be crazy to run mission critical workflows on OpenAI’s APIs at the moment,” says Smale. “There have been outages almost every day for the last two weeks, and that was kind of before all of the extra uncertainty around the personnel situation which is going on.”
PatientNotes itself doesn’t use OpenAI for its own product for that very reason, but Smale says the team often used it to help write code for improved productivity.
