Paul Stenhouse: ChatGPT releases new browser and the AWS outage caused glitches worldwide

ChatGPT has launched a browser 

It's only for Mac though. I tried it and was a little underwhelmed. The first two things I tried to get it to do it failed at. I asked it to get headlines from CNN and the NYTimes but those sites are restricted -- which may be a common issue as you start using it for your every day. Publishers and Apps are thinking about their AI access strategies after being burned from giving so much of their content to Google.  

I then asked it to draft an email and get it ready in Gmail - but it wasn't any faster than copy and pasting from ChatGPT directly. Not sure there is enough benefit just yet! 

 

The big outage earlier the week shows just how reliant we are on AWS 

Oh boy.. that was a day. 14 hours of downtime with spotty services as different Amazon web services were online and offline. It turned out to be a DNS issue. The ip addresses of the DynamoDB servers were wiped - effectively making them invisible to the internet. It would be like removing all the phone numbers from the phone book - it doesn't make the phone book very useful. Only trouble is that the cloud servers and other AWS services people use rely on that phone book to operate and connect to the internet. It meant they were all taken offline and exposed a bad failure point. 
 

It really showed that some companies don't have adequate failovers, or proper multi-cloud implementations. But, it didn't hurt them - their stock actually popped on the day of the outage and they have ended the week up ~5%. 

LISTEN ABOVE

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack team podcast
from News Talks at be You know how.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
There's a smart everything these days. You can get like
a smart toothbrush. You can get a smart bed or
a smart mattress. So it's a mattress that tracks your
sleep habits and it can heat up and cool down
and do various bits and pieces. But users of these
eight that's the name of the brand, eight Sleep smart
mattresses had a bit of a rough week. Some of

(00:33):
them were woken up when their mattresses got really hot,
and other ones the mattresses started sitting up and changing
their positioning even though they didn't want them to. And
it all came down to a fault with Amazon Web Services.
So these web services that provide kind of infrastructure cloud
infrastructure for lots of different products and websites around the

(00:55):
world went down during the week, which had all sorts
of unintended consequences. Our texpert poor Steinhouse has all the
details for us. Paul, you don't have one of those
fancy mattresses, do you that turned out not to be
quite as smart as you might have hoped.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
I don't, but I have to say, Jack the enthusiasm
in your voice talking about that was a little telling.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Well, I don't know. I mean some things like do
you really need to does everything need to be smart?
Does everything need to be connected? It's just it's funny, right, Like, look,
it's funny.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
But there was a problem where people had smart homes
and with smart locks, smart keys, and they couldn't get
into their homes. So that was a problem. Yes, but no, Look,
here's the one thing that it says, right, I mean,
the thing you have to remember about the cloud is
it's not mythical. It's not magical. It's someone else's server
that they maintain. You're renting a server effectively, and it

(01:47):
really does show that, you know, a lot of people
are renting these servers. Fun fact for you, did you
know Amazon's stock while they were having fourteen hours of downtime,
the stock popped on that day. It was up like
three percent, and I yes, it didn't go down. And
I think it's because it really shows that there is
such a reliance on these server.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
We've gone all in on the cloud. It's been the
talking point in corporate America certainly for the past ten years.
Get your cloud. It's cheaper don't have to maintain it
all this stuff. Well, we've moved to the cloud and
now we've got some failover issues. But what was really
interesting about this one was it's kind of like Amazon
uses Amazon's own services to run other Amazon services, and

(02:27):
that was what the big issue was this week. So
there's a database server, a service called Dynamo dB. I
won't bore you with the details of it, but what
effectively happened was the IP addresses of all of the
Dynamo dbs and the Virginia data center known as US
East one were lost. They were removed. So well, that

(02:49):
basically means is you've got a phone book, but all
of the phone numbers have been removed from the phone books.
You don't know anyone's phone numbers anymore. But the problem
is is that all the other Amazon services, they actually
need the numbers in the phone book to operate all
of their own services. So taking down this one database cluster,

(03:10):
which is a problem in and upon itself, right, like
losing entire access to a service that you sell as
bad one, but two all of these other services. I
think at one point there was something like twenty five
different Amazon services that were down because they all relied
on this one surface, yus, which is just incredible.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
It's amazing when something like one domino basically is what
you're telling us, one dominant complex terms, you know, but
one domino falls and then nick minute, you've woken up
in the middle of the night because your smart bed's
trying to follow itself in half. Hey, chet gpt has
launched a browser. So open Ai, the company behind chet
gptv been pursuing a few different products and tools and

(03:53):
things lately, but now they've launched an internet browser. So
if you have Google Chrome or Safari or something like
that on your computer, this is designed to compete.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
It is and I'm full of fun facts today. But
another fun fact, the open ai browser is effectively using
the same technology as Google Chrome. Google actually make it
open source and you can build browsers on top of it.
So it's a little bit kind of amusing the people
who want to go and take down Google and take
all of your attention away from Google searches is using

(04:25):
Google funded technology from Google Search and Google Ads to
then create their own things. Right that aside, Yes, So
what they're doing is they're baking chat gpt in into
the browser so when you first open it up, instead
of typically seeing what we've all seen for the past
twenty odd years, the beautiful Google search bar, you now

(04:46):
see a chat GPT box and you can start typing
into that instead of your Google Search, and you can
ask it questions. You can ask it to find information,
you can ask it to go to websites, all those
types of things. But it's also got a sort of
side panel, so when you're browsing to a website, you
can then say, like, chat about this week site with

(05:07):
chat GPT, so it takes all the context of that
page and it can even start to do actions. Now.
I tried it. I was hoping it was going to
be quite exciting, but it let me down twice. The
first time I was I was trying to get it
to give me I was like, okay, give me a
summary of the day's news from CNN or the New
York Times, right, and both of those websites were restricted
and it said I'm not allowed to do it. So

(05:28):
I was like, okay, well that was frustrating. Good good
for seeing in good for the New York Times that
I started to block chat GPT, But I was like,
that was annoying for me as a person trying to
use it anyway. Second of all, I thought, okay, let's
see if you can really test it. I'm going to
ask it to draft me an email and then get
it ready in my Gmail because it can do these actions, right.
It says it can take over and it can, you know,

(05:49):
effectively work the screen like a user could, and it
wrote the email just like it wouldn't chat GPT. But
then it asked me so many times for permissions to
do this and open it up here and do this.
It would have just been easier for me to copy
and paste it enter Gmail directly. So I will say
I was left a little bit disappointed under in the

(06:10):
browser underwell, and look, I have to say this too.
I mean, the US is a really big Apple market, right,
huge with the iPhone, sure, huge with the MacBook. And
so they've actually launched this only for Mac at the moment,
So if you have a Windows computer at the moment,
you're out of luck. You can't even try the check.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
This sounds like it's not that not that impressive. See,
I've found it's interesting how it's only once you really
play around with these things and kind of get into
a habit that it goes from being you know, like
a bit of a quirk quirky sort of party trick
or something, a bit of a novelty.

Speaker 3 (06:41):
You know.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
It takes a bit of time to work out exactly
if you can use these and kind of integrate them
as part of your daily life. I use chat GPT
heaps as a kind of search tool, Like I'm I'm
asking it questions that once I would have used Google,
and it's you know, I can only imagine that Google's
traffic has been significantly impacted by chat GPT, but the

(07:03):
fact that the browser hasn't quite nailed it yet kind
of intriguing.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
I mean, it can do that, so I guess I
was trying to really take it through its paces.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, of course. I mean that's like you've got to
have a reason that you would move away from your
current system, right, correct. And it sounds like if it's
blocked from those major websites, then that then in itself
is kind of a reason not to be using it.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
It's kind of annoying. Yeah, I will say. The thing
that I find with this AI stuff is if you
get it to generate something and you don't know that
what the outcome is supposed to be. It's incredible, right
because you can't verify it the moment you try. I
found personally if you try to use it for something
where you know what the outcome should be and you
say you've given it some documents and you're saying, hey,

(07:45):
summarize this, or take some values from a spreadsheet, or
do whatever it is trying to do, and then those
values and things aren't in the output. It's like, Okay,
can I trust it with the stuff that I thought
I could trust?

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (07:56):
Like that to me is where I'm like, Okay, maybe
I shouldn't be using it as a research tool. Yeah,
but as long as it gives me the links I
can then click on and go and verify the information,
I'm usually okay with it.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
Then you yeah, yeah, very interesting. Hey, thanks Paul. We
will let you get back to sleep on your smart snoozer,
Paul Steinhouse. Our textbook is.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame. Listen live
to News Talks at b from nine am Saturday, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio