163GB. That's how much RAM a documented ChatGPT session consumed before the host machine went down - a memory leak severe enough that most consumer computers couldn't even reach that threshold, since they'd exhaust their physical RAM and crash long before hitting it.
A memory leak happens when an application claims system memory and never releases it. Normal apps hold a roughly steady footprint regardless of session length; a process that balloons to 163GB means something inside ChatGPT is continuously accumulating data without clearing it. Getting there requires either an unusually long session or a machine with far more RAM than average (most consumer systems ship with 16-64GB total) - likely both.
OpenAI hasn't publicly addressed the report. If your machine starts slowing down during a ChatGPT session, the fastest fix is to kill the process entirely from Task Manager (Windows) or Activity Monitor (Mac) rather than just closing the window or tab - that actually frees the held memory. Closing the window often leaves the process running in the background, holding onto everything it's claimed. A fresh session after a full restart is the cleanest recovery.