I brainstormed a job change with AI to find my second career. Here's how you can do it, too. Amanda Smith is a freelance journalist and writer. She reports on culture, society, human interest and technology.

Fire up ChatGPT and submit any request at the prompt. In return, the AI will tell you that there's an error in the message stream or that something seems to have gone wrong. The trouble is the same whether you use the ChatGPT website, the Windows or Mac app, or the iOS or Android app.

OpenAI's ChatGPT, Sora image generator, and other tools were down Tuesday as the company suffered an outage. Reports of outages spiked early this morning, according to website status tracker Downdetector. By around 8:00 a.m., it had received more than 1,300 reports of outages from users who were unable to access OpenAI's generative AI tools.

OpenAI is keeping up its rapid-fire pace of new AI releases. The company introduced the o3 and o4-mini models to its ChatGPT platform in April. At the time, the business promised that a pro model of the o3 was on the way, and that version became available today.

The AI chatbot is out of commission for thousands of users. Here are some alternatives to keep you company while you wait for a fix.

We were eventually able to get the tool to answer the question, “Is ChatGPT down?” It said, “Yes—at the moment, ChatGPT is experiencing a global outage.” It pointed to v