New research shows how to extract a timestamp from ChatGPT IDs
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Summary
A researcher reverse-engineered the UUIDv8 identifiers in ChatGPT conversation URLs and found that the first eight hex characters are a Unix timestamp marking when the conversation was created. Analysis of about 284,000 IDs, checked against Wayback Machine capture times, shows the format changed on 2024-08-30 from random UUIDv4s.