Annoying ChatGPT Data Usage

While investigating slow load times on ChatGPT, I noticed that every reload of chatgpt.com downloads a lot of data, every single load. Most of it is a single request to https://ab.chatgpt.com/v1/initialize, which is Statsig, the feature flag and experimentation service that OpenAI bought last year (because why not). On every page load, the response is around 1MB on the wire, and 5.7MB of JSON once decompressed. About 4.7MB of that is dynamic_configs. The request body is JSON, base64-encoded, and then reversed (yes, really). Decoded, it contains (among other things): { "deltasResponseRequested": true, "sinceTime": 0, "partialUserMatchSinceTime": 1794316993881 } sinceTime: 0 means “give me everything since the beginning of time”, so the server does. The client even knows when the flags last changed: partialUserMatchSinceTime is the exact time from the previous response. Two reloads a few minutes apart get exactly the same time, company_lcut, and full_checksum back, so nothing has…

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