Human developers without AI now work like incompetent monkeys, Elon Musk jokes

ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all went down on Thursday, leaving users scrambling to work without their AI assistants. Joking about how dependent humans have become on AI, Elon Musk compared people working without it to a clumsy orangutan struggling with a stone and nails.Right image/ credit: ReutersLast night several major AI platforms mysteriously went down almost at the same time. ChatGPT, Claude and Grok faced outages, leaving users without the AI tools they increasingly rely on for work. While some joked about being forced to work without AI, others wondered how they would manage. Amid all this, Elon Musk joined the conversation, joking that humans without AI are like monkeys trying to get work done, clumsily and ineffectually.Quoting a meme on X featuring the viral orangutan clip, Musk joked about what humans look like without AI. The clip shows an orangutan struggling to use a stone to hammer a nail, trying to imitate how a carpenter works. “Humans writing code as seen by future AI”, Musk wrote while sharing the viral clip. Musk refers that in the future, AI may see humans writing code on their own as clumsy and inefficient, much like the orangutan in the clip struggling with the task in the clip.Some users on X even joke about Claude watching them code, with the AI portrayed like nature-documentary narrator David Attenborough observing the orangutan in the wild. The clip is quite popular nowadays, with developers and others users often sharing it in fun, comparing Attenborough to the smart ChatGPT and Claude while saying they have become like the orangutan in the video, clumsy and ineffective if they can’t use AI.Why did the AI platforms go down?Hours after the outage, there is still some mystery surrounding why the AI tools went down at the same time. The outages were not caused by one common problem, at least not according to the companies. OpenAI reported elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex on September 3 and said it had identified and mitigated the issue before restoring the services. “The issue causing elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex has been resolved. Some Codex remote control users may need to pair their mobile device again following this incident,” the company said in its final update after the services were restored.Anthropic also reported elevated errors affecting multiple Claude models. The company said, “We have identified the cause of elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5 and are working on a fix. We will provide an update as soon as possible.” Anthropic later said a fix had been deployed and the issue was resolved. Grok, meanwhile, suffered a separate outage. xAI's status page initially said, “Grok is experiencing issues. We are working on restoring service as quickly as possible.” The service was eventually restored after about three hours and 37 minutes, with xAI saying, “We have resolved the situation, and traffic is healthy again.”So, despite the timing, there is no confirmed evidence that one single failure brought down ChatGPT, Claude and Grok.All three services eventually recovered, but the outage was a small reminder of how much people now rely on AI. Developers use it to code and debug, writers use it to draft and edit, and many turn to chatbots for even simple research.So, when the AI tools suddenly stopped working, some users found themselves struggling with tasks they would normally hand over to a chatbot. And that is pretty much what Musk is poking fun at. As AI gets better at coding, he suggests, humans doing it the old-fashioned way could one day look to AI as clumsy and inefficient as the struggling orangutan in the clip.- EndsPublished By: Divya BhatiPublished On: Sep 4, 2026 12:36 IST