Chatgpt: OpenAI CEO clarifies why users saw others’ chat history on ChatGPT

ChatGPT was down for a lot of users earlier this week and people were not able to access their chat histories. Soon, reports emerged suggesting that some ChatGPT users were seeing someone else’ conversations in their chat history bar. Bloomberg reported that this was due to a bug and OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, had shut down the chatbot for some time. Now, the company CEO has confirmed the “significant issue” in ChatGPT was (indeed) due to a bug and the company has fixed it.
“We had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating,” Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, tweeted, adding that “a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history.”
The fix has reportedly fixed the problem and members of the TOI-Gadgets Now are also able to access their chat histories.

Altman also noted that the company “will follow up with a technical postmortem” but did not provide any timeline on the same.

What was the issue
The issue started on Monday (March 21) when users weren’t able to access ChatGPT. Some TOI-Gadgets Now team members also faced problems and said that the conversation did not go forward beyond two questions.
They were also greeted with “History is temporarily unavailable. We’re working to restore this feature as soon as possible” message.
OpenAI had said that they identified the root cause of the issue “and are working on resolution”, however, it did not list what caused the problem at that time. Hours later, the company said the conversational function of ChatGPT was restored and history-related issues were still being fixed.

ChatGPT ‘mixed’ chat histories
On Tuesday (March 22), people were still facing history-related problems and some claimed that they could see other people’s chat in their history sidebar. Around the same time, a report by Bloomberg made rounds on the internet claiming that OpenAI shut down the chatbot for some time in response to a bug.
The report also cited a spokesperson from the Microsoft-funded company who claimed that people were able to view “only brief descriptive titles” of chat histories, and not full transcripts of conversations, of some other users.
OpenAI ‘warning’ to users
OpenAI has recommended users “not share any sensitive information in your conversations” as users’ conversations may be reviewed by AI trainers to improve the systems.