OpenAI's Brent Traut Says ChatGPT Side Chats No Longer Expire or Disappear After an App Restart
Side chats in ChatGPT no longer expire or disappear when you restart the app! When I joined OpenAI, I found this to be one of the biggest pain points for side chat users, and as of today, it's fixed. Never lose data just because you updated, restarted, etc.
Context
It fixes a data loss problem that OpenAI's own engineer called one of the biggest pain points for side chat users, a small but practical reliability gain in ChatGPT.
Side chats in ChatGPT let users open a separate conversation alongside a main chat. Brent Traut (@btraut) works at OpenAI and posts about ChatGPT app updates.
Deep dive
Brent Traut (@btraut) posted on the afternoon of Nov 3 ET that side chats in ChatGPT no longer expire or disappear when users restart the app.
He writes that when he joined OpenAI, he found this to be one of the biggest pain points for side chat users, and that as of that day it is fixed. According to the post, users should never lose data just because they updated or restarted the app.
The post does not say which platforms got the fix, whether older side chats that already expired can be recovered, or whether there were other changes to how side chats work.
It is a small update compared with model launches, but it addresses a reliability complaint that many daily users ran into. The post passed 110,000 views, and replies included users saying they had lost side chats before.
It arrived the same day OpenAI shared other product news covered in this deck, including voice for ChatGPT Finances.
What to expect next
Watch for whether users confirm side chats now persist across updates on desktop and mobile. OpenAI may expand side chats further, such as making them easier to find or merge into a main chat. Data reliability in chat apps will keep getting attention as people store more work in them. Other assistant apps may face similar user demands for chats that survive updates and restarts.