So AI has been out long enough that almost everyone is using it. It makes it possible to automate so many areas of your business, including lead qualification and appointment booking AI (that’s us!). But when the entire world starts building businesses around these tools, what happens when the tool has downtime? Well OpenAI downtime has a substantial negative impact on integrated businesses. We are all drug addicts addicted to AI, and we get angry when AI stops doing its thing!
OpenAI Downtime Explained
Here’s the thing… OpenAI is going to go down sometimes. Check their downtime history here. Every software platform has downtime. Even OpenAI’s competitors like Anthropic and Gemini have downtime. This happens because of code and system updates, rare hardware issues, or even the rare solar flare storm! Over the past 30 days at the current date of writing, OpenAI has experienced a total of 5.5 hours of downtime across their API service (the service that systems like CloseBot use to power our applications).
Now let’s compare OpenAI to Google… what happens when Google goes down? I don’t know about you, but I open a different search engine. The nice thing about technology is that we have different options to turn to if our primary option isn’t working.
Why Not All Platforms Have AI Backups
You would think AI would be very similar to the above example. I mentioned other competitors like Anthropic and Gemini, so it would make sense to think that applications like CloseBot could use a different option if OpenAI downtime happened. Right?
OpenAI released their biggest update in January 2024 called OpenAI Assistants. This was a massive update that made it easier than ever for people to be able to upload their articles, websites, etc. for training and interact with that material 🤯 Before this, it was complex to implement something called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). It involves several more code steps, more interaction with AI, understanding of vector similarity, and ability to manage user uploads. It was much easier just to connect an application to an OpenAI Assistant and let OpenAI handle the heavy lifting. And this is what a lot of companies did.
So how does this affect backups? Well if a company is using OpenAI Assistants to handle their uploaded training materials, other products cannot access that information. Unless they have implemented their own RAG system, they cannot allow fallbacks like Anthropic and Gemini to reference those uploads. If OpenAI Assistants go down, so do they (in addition to downtime from their own software downtime). Since CloseBot has its own RAG system, we are free from reliance on a single application. This means CloseBot users experience significantly less downtime than other AI lead qualification platforms. At the time of writing, CloseBot has support for OpenAI and Anthropic and we automatically change over if one has issues.
Another Reason Why Backups Matter
Let’s look at an example of something that commonly happens in technology. Yahoo! refused to buy Google for a mere $1 million in 1998. Yahoo! was early to internet search and they were dominating. Today, Google is worth a whopping $863 billion and Yahoo! is worth approximately $5 billion. This isn’t an argument of whether OpenAI is like Yahoo! or like Google, but making a point that tides do change. I don’t know about you, but I’m not comfortable having my entire livelihood built on top of a single point of failure. Especially when it’s early days in AI and anything can happen.
CloseBot makes it easy for you to choose your AI priority. In fact, 47% of CloseBot users who have tested both options have chosen to use Anthropic as their primary AI instead of OpenAI. This isn’t because of OpenAI downtime, but because they prefer the AI responses. You can see a deeper comparison of the two here. Isn’t it nice to have options? Isn’t it nice not to have to worry about panic attacks when OpenAI downtime happens?
Parting Words
Obviously OpenAI is what CloseBot started with, and we have a soft spot for the company that made all of this possible. But we would be doing all of our users a disservice if we shackled ourselves to OpenAI Assistants alone. We are excited for the future of AI and will continue building tools that position our users above the rest, even if the tools that need building are more difficult to build! 💪
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