Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Storing the last changed date for every single person on earth (even though not every person is an OpenAI customer) is something you could easily do on a laptop. It would be a rounding error for OpenAI.

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...

 help



You seem to have forgotten to include every single setting each user can change.

Ok let’s say each user has 1000 settings. It’s still a rounding error.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: