>What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations

Have you used ChatGPT? Your conversation history is on the left rail

I read in the pleadings that OpenAI claims it cannot search its logs without decompressing them first

I can search the logs I keep without decompressing

Every user is different and each is free to use whatever software they want

Using RePair for compression I can also search inside compressed tarballs full of logs

To do this, I first insert a blank line at the top of each log file before adding to the tarball

IME, RePair is faster than compressing with zstd and the size reduction is almost the same

The only "catch" is that RePair requires more memory during compression

"Have you used ChatGPT?"

No

Large number of upvotes on the quoted comment however. Maybe some of those voters are ChatGPT users

I do searching from the command line in text mode. The script I use keeps a "log" (a customised SERP) of all query strings and search result URLs. I also have these URLs stored in the logs from the forward proxy. These are compressed using RePair. I can search the compressed logs faster this way than with something like

    ztsd -dc log.zst|grep pattern

    rg -z pattern log.zst

They made the feature, now they get to live with it. So they can spare us the feigned surprise and outrage.

Instead of writing open letters they could of course do something about it. Even Google stopped storing your location timeline on their servers and now have it per-device only.