Am I missing something obvious? Isn’t this just a simple DB query to see the state history of the “Data Controls” → “Improve model for everyone” toggle in the settings? Just report whether that was ever on and over what time period.
However, the mathematicians could easily declare whether they had the toggle on or off. Yet curiously, they will not say!
2. It's on by default,
3. Somebody says there's a second setting "don't train on my data", which is the real setting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639743
It was very weird on it's own almost like the setting didn't matter. Or the researcher was being dishonest with what they shared to The Verge
I don't know what format they use for storage, but Iceberg would be a reasonable choice. A date in iceberg format is 4 bytes[1]. I checked postgres as well as a reference point. It also uses 4 bytes for a date, so whatever they use it's going to be about that.
Current world population is just shy of 8.3 Billion people [2].
4 bytes times 8.3 billion people gives 30.92 GiB. [3] OpenAI's training data will be in the petabyte range at least.
[1] https://iceberg.apache.org/spec/#schema-evolution
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/ and elsewhere, say census.gov if you want a US source https://www.census.gov/popclock/world
[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=4+bytes+*+8.3+billion+i...