If you’ve perhaps opened the world’s favorite AI chatbot today, you may have come across a slightly disturbing message: ChatGPT has lost something, but it sounds like it could have been worse.
As the warning on ChatGPT’s interface explains, “We have restored conversation history for all ChatGPT users and resolved the underlying issue, which was caused by a significant bug in an open source library.”
That bug was big enough to cause two problems. Yesterday Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, tweeted:
“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 just finished validating.”
Altman added that “a small percentage of users were able to see other users’ conversation history titles.”
Seeing the titles of other users’ chat conversations could have been confusing for ChatGPT users who couldn’t remember the conversations and, because they could only see the titles and not the full context of the AI conversations, didn’t know where they really went about.
Altman said in his tweet, “we feel terrible about this.”
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 just finished validating. a small percentage of users were able to see other users’ conversation history titles. we feel bad about this.March 22, 2023
It seems that the attempt to fix that bug may have required the temporary deletion of ChatGPT conversation history. That seems reasonable. Unfortunately, the attempt to recover those ChatGPT conversation histories was not entirely successful.
The service alert explains:
“To ensure that this issue doesn’t reoccur, users will no longer be able to retrieve their chat history from the morning of March 20. We apologize to our users for any issues this may cause.”
There were no further details about the cause of the bug, although Altman promised “a technical post mortem”.
Losing what is probably a small piece of your weeks of chats with ChatGPT is probably not a big concern, unless that was when ChatGPT perfectly explained the meaning of life to you.
People forget that ChatGPT is a constantly evolving and still somewhat experimental AI platform that interacts with many non-technical people. They probably assume that ChatGPT should be as stable as, say, Microsoft Word, which probably won’t lose all the files you created on the morning of March 20.
The good news is that ChatGPT seems to be back to normal and stable. Better yet, Altman announced the launch of support for ChatGPT plugins, which could help ChatGPT work with more third-party tools and expand its capabilities and overall usefulness. However, don’t expect new tools right away. OpenAI has launched a waiting list for access to plugin support.
As for your lost conversations, you may want to start those chats again. You may find that ChatGPT has even more interesting answers. You could also start by trying out some of the other developing conversational AI platforms, such as Bing with ChatGPT and the new Google Bard.
