Ask HN: Did anyone else notice that the OpenAI Labs website was completely gone?

I was sad to discover today that all of my Dall-E image generations are gone, along with the entire https://labs.openai.com/ site. Apparently, some users received emails earlier in the year when it was about to be taken down, but I didn't. There were quite a few images in my history that I would have liked to have saved.

Maybe worse is how much this lowers my trust in OpenAI even further than it already had been. Dall-E was not a small platform; it was a cultural phenomenon accessed by hundreds of millions of users. It's bewildering that OpenAI would so silently "take it behind the shed."

I'm searching, and it doesn't seem as if there was even an HN post about the shutdown. So, it didn't even hit this place's radar. How many of you are hearing this for the first time?

I don't understand how a company like OpenAI could be so reckless with user data integrity and access, particularly when sunsetting a product. All of the big-dog tech platforms have fairly robust protocols for notifying users and allowing them to download their data (even with hoops to jump through). How can they hope to be one while still acting like a "move fast and break things" startup? I liked the thing they broke.

16 points | by underlipton 8 hours ago

3 comments

  • baobun 8 hours ago
    > I don't understand how a company like OpenAI could be so reckless with user data integrity and access

    I don't understand how one can have such a rosy view of OpenAI at this point after all the dishonesty, subversiness and shadiness we have seen in public. Transitive trust is an insidious thing, I guess?

    And this one doesn't even sound particularly egregious, I could hardly call this evil.

    Either shift down expectations of this company considerably or be disappointed again.

    [-]
    • guywithahat 6 hours ago
      > after all the dishonesty, subversiness and shadiness we have seen in public

      What are you talking about? I haven't heard anything negative about them other than generic "things are changing" grumbling

      [-]
      • frmersdog 3 hours ago
        The guy who runs it does not seem like the most trustworthy fellow. The whole Worldcoin debacle and all.

        Even the people who like ChatGPT were quite unhappy about the sudden deprecation of 4o and replacement by 5.

        On that note, there seems to be a pattern.

      • estimator7292 4 hours ago
        How about the unabashed raiding of the Commons? Scraping any and all websites over and over so fast that it kills small servers? Meddling in the government, lobbying for regulatory capture. Buying up enough future RAM production to quintuple prices for consumers and lock out competitors. All the copyright stuff. The shift from nonprofit to for-profit, the whole "open" part of OpenAI.

        Or perhaps the extremely explicit promise to put all of us out of work forever.

        Have you actually heard anything at all about this company from the real world?

      • mmh0000 4 hours ago
        You mean like... the CEO fucking his sister? You missed that!?

        https://www.distractify.com/p/sam-altman-sister

        [-]
  • javantanna 8 hours ago
    Yesterday, I was searching and couldn’t find it either. Now it all makes sense!
  • bigyabai 8 hours ago
    > I liked the thing they broke.

    But you didn't own it. You fell in love with a service that was offered at-will by one party, and then they left.

    This is the fate of all services, some faster than others. Don't like it? Stop paying for subscription slop.